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Chap.___.___. Copyright No,. 
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Hoy 9 



1898 



©3RUIiam 3 etortt Cttcto 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN HUMANITY. From Lib- 
erty to Union. An Oration delivered before the Phi 
Beta Kappa Fraternity of Harvard University, June 
30, 1892. i6mo, paper, 25 cents. 

THE MAKING AND THE UNMAKING OF THE 
PREACHER. Lectures delivered in March, 1898, on 
the Lyman Beecher Foundation, before the Divinity 
Students in Yale University. i6mo, $1.50. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 



THE MAKING AND THE 

UNMAKING OF THE 

PREACHER 

lectures 

ON THE LYMAN BEECHER FOUNDATION 
YALE UNIVERSITY, 1898 

BY / 

WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER 

PRESIDENT OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

0&t WmMt $1?$?, Cam&ribge 

1898 






COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



i.8616 



?TW) COMES RECEIVED. 
















3 



TO 

THE YOUNG MEN 

WHO HEARD THESE LECTURES 



CONTENTS 

LECTURE PAGE 

I. Preaching, under Modern Conditions . i 
II. The Making of the Preacher by Edu- 
cation 31 

III. The Unmaking Process . . . .61 

IV. The Preacher and his Art ... 90 

V. What the Preacher owes to the 

Truth 116 

VI. What the Preacher owes to Men . 145 

VII. The Pulpit and the Church . , • 169 

VIII. The Optimism of Christianity . . 198 



THE 

MAKING AND THE UNMAKING 
OF THE PREACHER 



PREACHING, UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 

Each new incumbent of this Lecture- 
ship can but feel the increasing stringency 
of the situation. Twenty-five courses of 
Lectures on Preaching have now been de- 
livered on the Lyman Beecher foundation. 
Doubtless one who ventures upon another 
course may count upon the good will of 
his predecessors, but he quickly learns that 
they have done nothing to lighten his task, 
but rather everything in their power to 
make it difficult. The one source of in- 
spiration and courage to each Lecturer, in 
his turn, is the presence and cooperation 
of men, who, in their turn, have come to 



2 PREACHING 

feel, in the separateness of their own first 
experiences, something of the responsibil- 
ity and joy of preaching. I thank you, 
therefore, for your assuring welcome. 

Allow me an opening word in regard to 
the significance of a subject in such a 
course of lectures as that now before us. 
A subject, to borrow the homely analogy 
of our Lord, seems to me to be like " the 
leaven which a woman took and cast into 
three measures of meal till the whole was 
leavened." It is the idea, the personal 
idea, which one casts into the common 
stock of opinions and experiences and be- 
liefs, and it is to be measured altogether by 
its quickening and pervasive force. It is 
not good as a subject beyond its power to 
leaven. 

I am proposing to speak to you about 
The Making and the Unmaking of the 
Preacher. That is my subject. Outside 
its reach I have nothing to say about 
preaching. My subject places us in the 
discussion, as you see, under the limita- 
tions of the personality of the preacher. 
We are also to remember that it gives us 
the freedom of his personality. 



MODERN CONDITIONS 3 

How shall we really put ourselves within 
so great a matter as that of preaching? 
Where is the point of reality ? I know of 
no place where one may so certainly expect 
to find it as in the consciousness of the 
preacher. Around him and above him 
stretch the vast ranges of truth. They all 
contribute something to his message. Be- 
fore him is the common humanity. No- 
thing which belongs to that can be alien to 
him. But neither truth nor man has any- 
thing to do with preaching until each has 
found the rightful place in the conscious- 
ness of the preacher. 

Here, then, you have the method as well 
as the reason of my subject. I am intent 
upon finding out and taking the measure 
of those forces which are steadily at work 
toward the making or the unmaking of the 
preacher, because they are actually deter- 
mining at any given time the value of 
preaching. Some men are preaching bet- 
ter at forty or at sixty than when they 
began ; others are not preaching as well. 
The unmaking process is going on side by 
side with the making process. Some of 
the forces which are acting in either direc- 



4 PREACHING 

tion are altogether personal ; others are 
too general to be of much account. We 
say that there are preaching ages, ages 
which furnish at once the message and 
the listening ear. We say that there are 
ages which are lacking in stimulus and in 
response. I think that we make far too 
much of these contrasts. I believe that 
it is one part of our business to reduce 
these variations to a minimum. If there 
is anything which should move on from 
generation to generation in the consist- 
ency of power, though it should be as 
flexible and elastic as the spirit of man, 
it is the Christian pulpit. 

I do not propose to enter into any defi- 
nitions of preaching. These have their 
legitimate place in the class room. But 
having chosen a subject which lays the 
stress so largely upon personality, I can- 
not afford to pass by the question — Who, 
under present conditions, is the Preacher ? 
I address myself to the answer of this 
question in the opening lecture. 

There are a great many ways in which 
we can discriminate the preacher from 
other men of like general aims or meth- 



MODERN CONDITIONS 5 

ods. We can say that he is like this man 
in the use of method, though unlike him 
at every other point; or that he is like 
that man in the object which he seeks to 
accomplish, though unlike him in other re- 
spects. Let us make no account of these 
likenesses or contrasts, but rather try to 
find what is necessary to enable one to 
meet the present conditions of preaching. 
Whether the preacher has much or little 
in common with men of like callings is 
for our purpose a matter of indifference. 
How shall we name the preacher of to-day 
by his actual work ? 

It may not be saying the greatest thing, 
but it is saying something very much to 
the purpose, as I conceive, when I insist 
that the preacher of to-day is the man who 
is able to enlist other men in his work of 
f persuasion. He is the man, that is, who is 
able to make his audience preach with him 
and for him. Jesus alone with the woman 
at Jacob's well was the preacher. Paul and 
Silas were preachers in the jail at Philippi. 
But they were not preaching under modern 
conditions. An essential, one is tempted 
to say, a supreme condition of modern 



6 PREACHING 

preaching, is an audience. Modern preach- 
ing is so far conditioned upon an audience 
that the argument for the pulpit above the 
press, as an agent for the effective commu- 
nication of truth, rests very largely upon 
this condition as a premise. Why should 
a man go to church when he can stay at 
home and read a sermon ? Put aside the 
necessity for worship, and what answer can 
you make ? It is hardly safe to risk the 
argument upon the assumed advantage of 
the spoken above the written word. That 
advantage depends upon the effect of the 
spoken word, not simply upon one's self as 
an individual, but also upon the whole body 
of which he is a part. It is indeed quite 
conceivable that the spoken word may find 
a lodgment in the heart of one hearer, 
when all others are untouched. The writ- 
ten word usually has a better fortune. But 
the highest efficiency of the spoken word 
may be far above that of the written word. 
The power of preaching, I insist, that 
which is natural and legitimate to it, is 
the power to reach the one through the 
many. It is the power to bring the con- 
senting reason and the awakened con- 



MODERN CONDITIONS 7 

science and the kindled emotion of the 
whole to bear upon every part. You can 
easily test this principle. You find your- 
self in an inattentive congregation, or, if it is 
formally attentive, unawakened and unkin- 
> died. The state of that congregation is a 
hindrance to your reception of the truth. 
You expend a good part of your power of 
reception in resistance to the general indif- 
ference. You find yourself in another con- 
gregation. The mood is eager and expec- 
tant. The congregation knows the preacher 
and is ready for him. Before he has uttered 
a word you are in a measure committed to 
him through those who have learned to feel 
his power. 

Every person who attends church may 
be made to answer a twofold purpose. To 
the degree to which he is receptive he 
thereby becomes influential. He is a com- 
municating force. In fact he may actually 
communicate more good than he receives. 
I doubt not that in every congregation 
there are those whose chief virtue lies in 
the fact that through their quick sensibili- 
ties they are distributing agents of the 
truth. 



8 PREACHING 

It is this possibility of using men as his 
allies in the interest of righteousness which 
constitutes one of the chief attractions of 
the pulpit to men of what is known as pop- 
ular power. There is a true philosophy in 
the vulgar, commercial test of a preacher, 
— " Can he draw ? " Drawing men means 
that the preacher is utilizing them. They 
may not be conscious of it. Some of them, 
if they knew it, might deny the fact. Still 
the fact remains. It is the reason for their 
presence. 

If you ask me in what this power of the 
preacher to utilize an audience consists, or 
why it is that one man can make an audi- 
ence preach with him more than another, 
I do not intend to be beguiled into any 
detailed answer. The personal gift which 
is usually offered in explanation of per- 
sonal power is always insufficient and 
often misleading. But I will give one an- 
swer, without prejudice to what I may 
wish to say hereafter, which seems to me 
to be most inclusive. The power of a 
preacher to reach the individual through 
the audience is usually in proportion to 
the depth and breadth of his humanity. 



MODERN CONDITIONS 9 

The great preachers have various personal 
characteristics. Some have humor, and 
therefore pathos, and others have neither. 
Some are men of presence, others are not. 
Some speak, others read. Some are think- 
ers, others speak to the limit of the last 
thought. But, without an exception, all 
within my knowledge who stand the test 
of compelling others to join with them in 
their work of persuasion are men of tre- 
mendous humanity. 

What do we mean by humanity when 
we apply it as a quality to the individual ? 
Certainly it is something very different, as a 
qualifying term, from the adjectives which 
come out of the same root. To say that a 
man is human is to suggest some weakness 
or fault, on which we look with leniency, if 
not with tenderness. We like to draw our 
great men a little nearer to us on the com- 
mon ground of shortcomings and imperfec- 
tions. It was not on the whole an unplea- 
sant discovery when the American people 
found out that Washington had a vigorous 
vocabulary. And when we go a step further 
and say that a man is humane, we simply 
apply to him a term of advanced civiliza- 



io PREACHING 

tion. We mean that he has the great qual- 
ities of justice, tolerance, and charity. But 
when we speak of the humanity of an indi- 
vidual, we refer, I think, to the amount of 
human nature which is to be found in him. 
It is a word of amplitude, a term of inclu- 
siveness, standing over against everything 
which is narrow or hard or thin, as well as 
against mere artificiality and conventional- 
ism. We naturally turn for our chief ex- 
ample to that great impersonality, Shake- 
speare, who, however elusive he may have 
been in himself, held in his imagination 
every type of human nature, and whose 
creations are therefore as secure in the life 
of the world as are the men of its own his- 
tory. Or we turn to our own Lincoln, 
whose personality when measured at this 
point seemed almost as great as that of the 
nation. I doubt if the national conscience 
ever carried a heavier burden of justice 
than that which weighted his soul. Recall 
Emerson's word about him, spoken at Con- 
cord on the day of his burial, — " He is the 
true history of the American people in his 
time. Step by step he walked before them, 
slow with their slowness, quickening his 



MODERN CONDITIONS n 

march by theirs, the true representative of 
this continent, an entirely public man, 
father of his country, the pulse of twenty 
millions throbbing in his heart, the thought 
of their minds articulate in his tongue." 

Humanity then, according to our under- 
standing of it, is something quite beyond 
any of the terms which are identified with 
it. It is in every way to the advantage of 
the pulpit that ministers are now under- 
stood to be human. When it was ac- 
cepted as a qualification for the ministry 
that one was not a man of like passions 
with others, or when the ministry itself was 
considered as offering special exemptions 
from temptation, it must have been a terri- 
ble ordeal to preach. I cannot conceive 
how a man could stand in the presence of 
his fellow men and speak right out the 
words w r hich should fall into the midst of 
temptation and struggle, and at the same 
time feel that his words might stir the 
question in any man's heart, — what do 
you know about it all? where are your 
temptations ? Let us be thankful for the 
recognition of the human in the profession 
of the ministry. And of course it goes 



12 PREACHING 

without saying that ministers are supposed 
to be a humane class, notwithstanding the 
occasional bloodthirstiness of the pulpit in 
times of national excitement. 

But the humanity of the pulpit, its power 
to cover in thought and feeling the life be- 
fore it, to stand for the common nature, to 
be so far able to represent men that it can 
turn them to its own uses, that is something 
which waits full recognition, because it is 
something which needs to become more 
evidently the fact. I was careful to say 
when I began to speak about this matter, 
that the ability of the preacher to make 
other men help him, to make his audience 
preach for him, might not be the greatest 
condition of modern preaching which one 
has to satisfy ; but the more we dwell upon 
what this ability implies, the more we shall 
be disposed, I think, to advance the claim. 
Nothing can be more fundamental to the 
preacher than his humanity. There lies 
the priestly quality of his life. And just as 
the wants and desires and aspirations of 
men go sweeping through his humanity 
when he intercedes for them with God, so 
through that same channel God's message 



MODERN CONDITIONS 13 

returns to them. Preaching at its best is 
prayer turned round. " Now then we are 
ambassadors for Christ, as though God did 
beseech you by us : we pray you in Christ's 
stead, be ye reconciled to God." 

It may seem to you, however, that I put 
myself on clearer and firmer ground, when 
I say that if one is to satisfy the conditions 
of modern preaching he must be able to 
show that he has a sufficiency of truth in 
actual command. Of course this means 
the authority of the pulpit. I desire to say 
with the greatest possible emphasis that 
modern preaching waits the word of au- 
thority. There is a good deal of preaching 
which is not modern, which uses the author- 
itative language and tone. On occasions, 
as it passes into controversy, it deals in ana- 
themas. But these are manifestly futile. 
An assertion of authority which wakens 
the protest of the devout reason or reverent 
scholarship of an age fails, because it lacks 
one of the chief elements of authority. 
Authority cannot rest upon the impossible 
or the unreasonable, or upon what may be 
to most minds the merely external. When, 
therefore, men of recognized spiritual power 



i 4 PREACHING 

choose to plant themselves upon the liter- 
alism of Scripture, they are accepted by the 
majority of their hearers for what they are 
in themselves, not for what they say. Their 
life may preach to all, and it may be a glo- 
rious message ; but the interpretations, the 
criticisms, and the arguments in which they 
trust for conviction, meet none of the con- 
ditions of authority. 

But because a good deal of the author- 
ity which the pulpit assumes is misplaced, 
it by no means follows that we have 
enough of it. On the contrary, I reaffirm 
the statement that the mind of the age is 
ready and anxious to come under the au- 
thority of truth. What proportion of men \ 
do you think wish to reason God out of 
existence or out of his world ? How many 
are longing to disbelieve in immortality? 
How many of those even who break the 
commandments wish to abolish them? 
How many would prefer to have Chris- 
tianity proven a myth rather than an his- 
toric fact ? Let us not wrong the temper 
of our age, however much we may share 
in its mental perplexities. I am confident 
that nothing would receive so true a wel- 



MODERN CONDITIONS 15 

come from the mind of this age as some 
great vindication of religious faith — the 
equivalent in our time of Butler's Anal- 
ogy, or of Edwards on the Will. It is no 
disproof of this opinion to say that we 
stumble over the creeds and confessions. 
We forget that the ages which produced 
these symbols had the advantage of us in 
that these symbols were their own produc- 
tions. The age which produces the next 
great confession will take delight in it, 
and repeat it in sincerity, it may be in 
triumph. 

Meanwhile, however, we must remind 
ourselves, in justice to the fact, that faith 
has not been left amongst us without its 
witnesses. If pressed too hard, our age 
may reply to any age of the creed, " Show 
me thy faith without thy works, and I will 
show thee my faith by my works." The 
same faith which wrote the confessions is 
busy on mission fields, in hospitals, and in 
schools. It is no more to the discredit of 
faith to be obliged to confess that it is now 
more practical than intellectual, than it is 
to the discredit of genius to be obliged to 
confess that it has gone over so largely 



16 PREACHING 

into invention, and become the slave of 
utility. And yet, I think that I cannot be 
mistaken when I note the growing desire 
and disposition of men to come again 
under the sway of great intellectual beliefs, 
to come again under authority. This is 
no retrograde movement. It is not a call 
to rest. It is rather, as I interpret it, the 
appeal of the intellect to be allowed to go 
out once more into the affirmative, and to 
take the open field in behalf of spiritual 
truth. We have given over a long gener- 
ation to criticism, to discussion, and to 
readjustment in the region of theological 
beliefs. Darwin published the " Origin of 
Species " in 1859 ; Jowett, the " Essays and 
Reviews " in i860; and Colenso, his views 
on "The Pentateuch" in 1862. From 
that time on English-speaking Christen- 
dom has been engaged in investigation or 
controversy. There has been no waste of 
time. There is no reason now for impa- 
tience. Neither truth nor righteousness 
is ever in haste. As Charles Sumner 
used to say, " Nothing is settled till it is 
settled right." But as the power of the 
pulpit depends upon the sufficiency as well 



MODERN CONDITIONS 17 

as upon the certainty of truth, there is 
coming to be a popular demand for an in- 
crease in the volume of acknowledged 
truth. Measured by the formalities of the 
creeds, there has been a large shrinkage. 
Has there been in reality a shrinkage ? 
Has there not been an extension of natu- 
ral and revealed truth — if in using these 
terms we keep to the old distinctions — in 
all directions ? Is not the thought of God 
larger, closer, more pervasive than ever 
before ? Does not Jesus Christ hold a 
more fundamental and central position 
than he held at the time when Christianity 
began to be reexamined ? Is the Bible 
less true in its new freedom than when it 
was in bondage to inerrancy and infallibil- 
ity ? Are the problems of human destiny 
less serious or awful because studied in 
the terms of a larger Christianity. Surely 
if we are straitened, it is not in the truth, 
it is in ourselves. 

I do not underestimate the work of a 
generation just emerging from a period of 
criticism and controversy. We must be 
patient. No progress is made by running 
in advance of facts. But there comes a 



18 PREACHING 

time, we are always to remember, when 
the pulpit anticipates the schools. Great 
truths announce their presence before they 
are formulated. They are tried, proven, 
experienced, before they are ready for the 
confessions. The proclamation of the in- 
coming truth always precedes by necessity 
and therefore by right the formulation of 
it. This has been the history of the great 
doctrines. The deity of our Lord, and in 
due time his humanity, justification by 
faith, the sovereignty of God, the universal- 
ity of the atonement, were all apprehended 
and declared by the clearer and braver 
souls before they became the doctrines of 
the church. It is at the dawn, before a 
truth has faded into the light of common 
day, that the preacher has the rare, inspir- 
ing authoritative opportunity. Let no man 
be deceived by the shallow dictum, — the 
true is not new, the new is not true. Truth 
is always coming into the world under con- 
ditions which make it for the first time clear 
and imperative. Then it is as new as if it 
had not always existed. It was justifica- 
tion by faith on the background of pen- 
ance, indulgences, and superstition, which 



MODERN CONDITIONS 19 

gave us the Reformation. It was the 
sovereignty of God over against spiritual 
tyranny in high places which gave us 
Puritanism. It was a universal atonement 
made necessary by the unanswerable ap- 
peal of an opening world which gave us 
modern missions. It is no less evidently 
true that the immanence of God could 
not have come into the real apprehension 
of the world until modern science had pre- 
pared the way for it; nor that the con- 
ception of the Kingdom of God on earth 
could have really become a hope and an 
expectation until men had begun to see, 
as in our time, the capacity of human 
society, and had begun to feel, as we are 
feeling, those strange and well-nigh uni- 
versal yearnings for the brotherhood of 
man. The process is always going on. It 
is the divine method to bring out truths, 
to force them to the front, to make them 
new. Blessed are the ages in which the 
work is most evident. Blessed are the 
men who at such a time have vision. 

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken : 
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 



20 PREACHING 

He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 

But you may say to me, every preacher, 
as he begins his work, has something more 
than the uncertainties of his time to con- 
tend with. He has the uncertainties of his 
own mind. How then can he have author- 
ity? Dr. Dale quotes the saying of a 
young friend, " A minister, when he is just 
beginning to preach, must sometimes write 
a sermon to clear his own mind on a sub- 
ject." To which he adds the shrewd re- 
mark, " A sermon which is written to clear 
the mind of the preacher will be very 
likely to perplex and confuse the minds 
of the hearers." " It would strike you as 
very odd," he goes on to say, " if a politi- 
cian told you that he had made a speech 
in Congress in order to clear his own 
mind on the true economical doctrine 
about money." No, that particular exhibit 
would not strike us as very odd, but, bar- 
ring the illustration, we will take the prin- 
ciple. 

I may be pardoned if I refer to an expe- 
rience of this sort: in my own early minis- 



v 



MODERN CONDITIONS 21 

try. I had prepared a sermon which had 
been, I doubt not, profitable to me, but 
which was so utterly ineffective as a ser- 
mon that I took the liberty of asking a 
very discerning friend what was the diffi- 
culty with it. His reply was the best criti- 
cism I ever received. " You seemed to 
me," he said, " to be more concerned about 
the truth than about men." Yes, that was 
the difficulty. I saw it in a moment. I 
had no right as a preacher to be concerned 
about the truth. I should have had the 
truth in command, so that I could have 
given my whole concern to men. As it 
was, the sermon lacked authority. 

It is not so practical a question as we 
may at first suppose — how far can the 
preacher be a searcher after truth and yet 
be the preacher. A searcher after truth 
he must be to be the preacher. The 
preacher ought to have the two qualities 
of freshness and fullness. I have recently 
listened to a course of lectures from one 
of the really great teachers of our time, a 
man characterized by both these qualities. 
He told, I think, the secret of his power, 
when he chanced to say in conversation, 



22 PREACHING 

" Every day's lecture should stand for what 
a man might say, as well as for what he 
does say." It is the unsaid word, if we 
know it is there, it is the sense of power 
in reserve after one has done his best, it 
is the absolute certainty of mental and 
spiritual growth, which give a people con- 
fidence and grateful delight in a preacher. 
But a preacher must learn to guard 
the processes of his mind so that he can 
think not only forward but backward : 
backward, that is, toward what is most fun- 
damental and even elementary in truth ; 
for it is there that he makes sure and 
deep contact with the mind of his audi- 
ence. " What is eloquence," Vinet asks, 
" but the power of the commonplace ? It 
is making the primitive chords vibrate." 
Great fundamental truths have this power : 
unquestioned and unquestionable truths, 
that go from heart to heart, never denied 
access or hospitality, and never enfeebled 
by use. The more of these truths the 
preacher has in command, the more he 
will be able to realize what I spoke of at 
the beginning, the preaching power of 
an audience. A truth of this sort when 



» v 



MODERN CONDITIONS 23 

once it is in full play between the preacher 
and audience, how good it is to be either 
preacher or hearer ! Hearing is then the 
answering voice. Preaching and hearing 
— it is " deep calling unto deep." 

Grant that the preacher of to-day has 
humanity and authority, that he has the 
power to compel men to help him in his 
work of persuasion, and that he has a suf- 
ficiency of truth in command, what does 
he lack, if he lack at all, in meeting the 
conditions of modern preaching ? Is there 
any other quality, which is a peculiar ne- 
cessity of our age, and which, because of 
this necessity, the age has the right to de- 
mand of the pulpit? I answer unhesitat- 
ingly, yes: the preacher of to-day must 
have faith. He must be able, that is, to 
give men elevation and outlook. 

One cannot fail to see when looking 
at our time from a spiritual point of 
view, that it is not only self-absorbed, but 
self-centred and self-sufficient. We have 
broken the connection with other times. 
We are living in the isolation of our 
knowledge, as others may have lived in 
the isolation of their ignorance. We are 



24 PREACHING 

so much to ourselves that we have re- 
jected the companionship of the past, and 
are not anxious or even curious about the 
future. Of course, this is a kind of pro- 
vincialism ; just as the resident of a great 
city is apt to be bounded by it to the de- 
gree by which he is enlarged by it. The 
average Londoner or Parisian or New 
Yorker lives more in his city than in his 
country. He is not so sensitive to the 
national spirit as his neighbor is who is 
less overpowered by his immediate sur- 
roundings. 

It is not to be wondered at that the aver- 
age mind which is in and of this age is 
bounded by it. Not only is there more of 
the world than at any previous time, but 
most of the things in the world are worth 
more. One cannot calculate by just how 
much the valuation of the world is in- 
creased. This is not necessary. The 
moral effect of this increase lies in the 
appeal which the world of to-day makes to 
sense rather than to faith. In spite of the 
great contrasts in material condition, no 
one can mistake the satisfaction which 
men take in the material world, as they 



MODERN CONDITIONS 25 

know it, as they possess it. With some it 
is a purely sordid gratification, the mere 
sensual enjoyment of prosperity. With 
others it is the satisfaction which comes 
from the opportunity of search and strug- 
gle, the hot competition of the business 
world. With others still it is the joy of in- 
vestigation and physical research, the pur- 
suit of knowledge for the sake of know- 
ledge. We cannot overestimate the fact 
that the world, this physical world, means 
more to us than it ever meant to living men. 
Never before did men possess so many lands 
or subdue so many seas. Never before did 
men know so well the secret of wealth. 
And never before have there been opened 
to them so many provinces in the invisible 
realms of matter. 

Now it is not difficult to see that soon or 
late there will be a spiritual reaction from 
this intense satisfaction in what we call the 
world. I do not mean simply a reaction 
from low and sordid worldliness, but from 
all which the material world has to offer. 
The soul of man cannot live upon the in- 
come of material wealth. The soul of man 
cannot live upon the discoveries of science. 



26 PREACHING 

Extend the world as you will, there is no 
lasting satisfaction in it for the human soul. 
And when the time of spiritual dissatisfac- 
tion comes, — no one knows how near it is, 
— then we have this alternative, either the 
return to some kind of other worldliness, 
or the advance into some more spiritual 
conception of the world itself. I cannot 
believe in modern medievalism. I must 
believe in such a spiritual interpretation 
of this world, and in such a spiritual use 
of its forces as will satisfy the souls of 
men. 

But, meanwhile, the problem of the 
preacher is how to lift men above their 
time for spiritual uses, how to give them 
elevation and outlook. You may be sur- 
prised when I say that one of the greatest 
incentives to faith in such a time as this is 
the historic spirit. Here lies the interpre- 
tative power of faith. Balaam was right 
when he said of Israel, " Israel has no need 
of diviner or soothsayer: it is enough to 
say in Israel, what hath God wrought." 
The men of our time must be made to see 
and to know their place in the long plan of 
God. We need to go back far enough to 



V 



MODERN CONDITIONS 27 

get the grade on which the world has been 
moving, to feel the ascent in the providence 
of God. The increasing argument for faith 
lies in history. It is the great argument 
against narrowness, against complacency, 
against low outlooks. It lifts the spiritual 
horizon. 

When we think of the peculiar office of 
faith we naturally turn toward the unseen. 
One of our first questions is about immor- 
tality. Can the preacher make that real to 
men to-day ? Yes, but not in the same 
way as at some other times. This world is 
not the same as when the contrast was first 
made between it and heaven. The outlook 
into the future from Rome under Nero was 
very different from the present outlook 
from England and America. Persecution 
offers no spur to hope. The Christian cen- 
turies have made this world more desirable. 
We can hardly sing, except under some 
spiritual exaltation, the hymns of mediaeval 
saints as they turned their hearts heaven- 
ward. It is not possible therefore that im- 
mortality can make its appeal in precisely 
the same way to us as to them. It is no 
longer the appeal of one world against an- 



28 PREACHING 

other. What is the present significance of 
immortality ? It is the appeal to the soul of 
man in behalf of its rights both here and 
hereafter. Immortality means more and 
more the spiritual, not only that which out- 
lives time, but that which cannot be satisfied 
with the things of time. The faith of the 
preacher shows itself therefore in the clear- 
ness, in the urgency, and in the expectation 
with which he addresses himself to the spir- 
itual man. If he does not himself see the 
things of the spirit here and now, and be- 
lieve in them, he has scant vision for such 
an age as ours. If he does see these 
things, if men as they come and go be- 
fore him are more to him in their souls 
than in their outward estate, whatever it 
may be, they too may have power to look 
at the greater and imperishable self, and 
come under the power of the vision now 
made their own. 

But there is another way of elevation and 
uplift which is open to the preacher accord- 
ing to his faith. I believe that it is in some 
respects more possible to make Christ real 
to men than it is to make their own souls 
real to them. And if there has been any ad- 



MODERN CONDITIONS 29 

vantage from the distractions to the pulpit 
during these past years, it has been in the 
unanimity and urgency with which the pul- 
pit has turned to the person of Christ It is 
the wider and more familiar knowledge of 
Christ, which, more than all else, has held 
our age to faith. Men could not utterly 
disbelieve in his presence, they could not 
deny the Kingdom of God which he set 
up on the earth, they could not despair of 
themselves, when they saw the possibilities 
of their own nature revealed in him. There 
are altogether insufficient ways of preach- 
ing Christ, but I doubt not that even 
through these many have been led to touch 
the hem of his garment and have been 
made whole. It is given to the individual 
soul to claim the right of its full salvation 
in Christ. That obtains at all times and in 
all places. It has been given to our age in 
a very real and very peculiar sense to be 
saved, as an age, by the presence of Christ. 
It is his presence which has made it possi- 
ble for the spiritual to live in the midst of 
the tremendous materialism of the century. 
I think that I have said enough in these 
opening words to show you my conception 



30 PREACHING: MODERN CONDITIONS 

of the preacher as he undertakes his work 
under present conditions. Modern preach- 
ing puts the emphasis on the humanity of the 
preacher, on his authority, and on his faith. 
He must have power enough over men to 
make them help him ; he must have some 
sufficient truth in absolute command, that 
is, he must be possessed by it ; and he must 
have some vision of the spiritual, which, at 
the highest, as at its nearest, is the vision 
of Christ. 

Do the conditions seem to you to be 
hard ? They are none too hard for the 
greatness of the work, nor for the joy of its 
reward. 



V 

V 



II 



THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER BY EDUCA- 
TION 

In the opening lecture, after considering 
the motive and reason for our subject, we 
passed at once to the question, Who, under 
present conditions, is the Preacher ? Mod- 
ern preaching, as we saw, lays the empha- 
sis upon the humanity of the preacher, 
upon his authority, and upon his faith. 
The questions which it is asking all the 
while, and with the greatest solicitude 
about every man in the pulpit, are these : 
Does he compel other men to help him in 
his work of persuasion : does he make his 
audience preach for him ? Has he a suffi- 
ciency of truth in command : does his 
preaching rise to the stress of a gospel ? 
Is he reaching the spiritual man who is in 
bondage to the material wealth of the age : 
is he able to give elevation and outlook to 
those about him ? 



32 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

These questions, as we judged, revealed 
the inexorable conditions of modern preach- 
ing, — hard conditions, we granted, were 
they not matched by the greatness of the 
preacher's task, and by the joy of accom- 
plishing it. 

There is another question which lies 
upon the threshold of our discussion. It 
is so much a part of our inquiry into the 
Making of the Preacher, that we cannot 
afford to pass it by. How far can we ex- 
pect to educate the Preacher ? 

I address myself to-day to the answer to. 
this question, premising that it is in no 
sense limited to the training in our semi- 
naries. 

We are met at the outset by the classifi- 
cation in some minds of the preacher with 
the poet and orator, as born, not made. 
Let us not altogether ignore this classifica- 
tion. The preacher may be the poet or 
the orator, according to his birthright. 
And to the extent to which he justifies 
either claim, it is to be admitted that there 
is a personal element which is a law unto 
itself. " Genius," John Foster says, "lights 
its own fires." The independence of genius 



BY EDUCATION 33 

is to be acknowledged. If any consider- 
able part of those entering the ministry 
or any profession bore the unmistakable 
mark of genius, I confess that our systems 
of education would be strained to make 
room for them. Somebody has asked 
what chance Carlyle would have in a mod- 
ern university. Tennyson refers with lit- 
tle satisfaction or gratitude to his student 
days at Cambridge. It is not enough to 
reply with the cheap sarcasm that it will 
be sufficient time to consider this matter 
when the number of Carlyles and Tenny- 
sons entering our universities is appreci- 
able. We are not to trifle with the per- 
sonal element in any man. It is as sacred 
to society as to the individual. I concede 
that it must be allowed the largest free- 
dom which it can show a right to, and that 
it must be put under the full stimulus to 
which it is entitled. Education cannot be 
conditioned in mediocrity. It must have 
regard to the exceptional as well as to the 
average man. Indeed, there is an increas- 
ing reason, which I will adduce in a mo- 
ment, why I think that in the training or 
recruiting for the ministry especial re- 



34 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

gard should be had for the exceptional 
man. We are beginning to recognize the 
fact that in the interest of the social econ- 
omy, for the very necessities of society, 
we must draw upon the widest sources of 
intellectual supply, and open the way out 
toward all the unknown possibilities of 
genius. Let me quote the word of Pro- 
fessor Marshall in reference to the large 
duty of education at this point, assuming 
that what he says has its proportionate 
application to the use of opportunity and 
incentive toward the ministry : 

" The laws which govern the birth of 
genius are inscrutable. It is probable that 
the percentage of the children of the work- 
ing classes who are endowed with natural 
abilities of the highest order is not so great 
as that of the children of people who have 
attained or have inherited a higher position 
in society. But since the manual-labor 
classes are four or five times as numerous 
as all other classes put together, it is not 
unlikely that more than half of the best 
natural genius that is born in the country 
belongs to them; and of this a great 
part is fruitless for want of opportunity. 



\ ^ 



BY EDUCATION 35 

There is no extravagance more prejudicial 
to the growth of national wealth than that 
wasteful negligence which allows genius 
that happens to be born of lowly parent- 
age to expend itself in lowly work. No 
change would conduce so much to a rapid 
increase of national wealth as an improve- 
ment in our schools, and especially those 
of the middle grades, combined with an ex- 
tensive system of scholarships, which would 
enable the clever son of a working man to 
rise gradually from school to school till he 
had the best theoretical and practical edu- 
cation which the age can give." 

Now the special reason for consideration 
in behalf of the ministry, of the unknown 
or exceptional man, lies in the change 
which has taken place in the outward in- 
centives toward the ministry. Under the 
New England traditions the ministry was 
an aristocracy, and therefore had the social 
incentive at work for its supply. Family 
life was set toward it. It passed as a pro- 
fession from father to son. Children were 
consecrated to that form of service, and not 
infrequently bore names to remind them of 
their high calling. Mr. Beecher used to 



36 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

say that " none of the boys in his father's 
family ever thought of trying to get away 
from the ministry, except one, and that he 
made no such success in his waywardness 
as to encourage the others to attempt to 
follow him." The ministry of that time 
was more than a profession, it was a class. 
Our non-conformist brethren from Eng- 
land who visit us think that traces of this 
distinction still remain. 

And as the family life was set toward 
the ministry, so was the higher education. 
College after college arose, that " the light 
of learning should not go out, and that the 
study of God's word should not perish." 
If one wanted the best education, he must 
find it in the courses leading to the minis- 
try. These were full and abundant. They 
had the acknowledged right of way. They 
moved on in easy confidence to the remot- 
est bounds of theological learning. The 
contract with the first professor of lan- 
guages in Dartmouth College ran as fol- 
lows : " Mr. Smith agrees to settle as pro- 
fessor of English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 
Chaldee, Syriac, etc., in Dartmouth Col- 
lege, to teach which and as many of them 



BY EDUCATION 37 

and other such languages as he shall under- 
stand, as the trustees shall judge necessary 
and practicable for one man, and also to 
read lectures on them as often as the pre- 
sident and tutors, with himself, shall judge 
profitable to the seminary." 

We may not say, perhaps, that the change 
in regard to these two early incentives to 
the ministry is equally great. The ten- 
dency of the family toward the ministry 
is probably still stronger than that of the 
school. But from both directions the 
change is very manifest. And the com- 
pensation for this change is in the fact 
that in place of these intermediate influ- 
ences we have now the more direct appeal 
of the ministry to the individual man. 
More men are to-day, I believe, entering 
the ministry of their motion than at any 
previous time. I have in mind not a few 
candidates who are making their way into 
it out of hindering and diverting surround- 
ings. I see those in our colleges who want 
to cross the lines of study that they may 
put themselves into connection with a the- 
ological training, indicating that the earlier 
direction was unadvised. I take account 



38 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

of those who are leaving other professions 
while it is yet early enough to study for 
the ministry. Nothing, I think, impressed 
me so much, when in the service of a the- 
ological seminary, as the number and the 
quality of men who had turned to the pul- 
pit out of mature conviction, and under 
purely personal and independent incentives. 
I am convinced that the recruiting ground 
of the ministry must be more and more 
among undesignated, uninfluenced, un- 
known, and exceptional men. The min- 
istry must find its recruits, like any call- 
ing, among those who are so minded ; 
only that in this regard it has the mighty 
advantage, in the case at least of the excep- 
tional man, that he is consciously and im- 
peratively called of God. 

As we pass then to the direct question, 
How far can we educate the preacher ? we 
must keep in mind the fact that educa- 
tion no longer makes a favorite of him. 
The favorite now is the student of science. 
The larger increase of subject matter, the 
accepted method, and the enthusiasm from 
discovery and from application, are to his 
especial advantage. So it appears. But I 



BY EDUCATION 39 

am not sure that it is really any more to his 
advantage than it is to the advantage of 
the preacher. In any event what matters 
it whether we be favorites or not ? Who 
wants more than his opportunity ? 

Education, meaning by it that organized 
system which is now open to every one, 
can do these three things to make ready 
the preacher : 

First, it can do more than at any previ- 
ous time to develop and furnish the man, 
provided he has insight and patience. The 
old education, which specialized from the 
beginning straight toward the ministry, 
produced some very clear and noble re- 
sults, the like of which you may see to-day 
in the Romish priesthood. It was an edu- 
cation with clearly prescribed ends, which 
were reached by clearly prescribed meth- 
ods. But something often seems to be 
lacking in the lives of those who came 
under that training, and sometimes the 
lack is pathetic. We are aware that the 
whole man is not always before us. Some 
part of the nature is untouched, or if 
touched undeveloped. Occasionally we 
get a hint of what the life might have 



4 o THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

been under a broader or freer training. 
Does any one suppose, after reading Jon- 
athan Edwards' study of the spider, that it 
would have been a loss to theology if he 
had opened his mind wide to the study of 
nature ? To the extent to which we allow 
ourselves to be less than we are capable of 
being, we make ourselves of less use to 
society. Society wants the full man, the 
live man, the sincere man. I do not refer 
to the after straightening which may come 
to every one. The first business of educa- 
tion is to make sure that the discovery of 
one's self is reasonably complete. And at 
this point modern education can serve 
the preacher better than the old, provided, 
I have said, he be patient. Impatience, 
haste, will neutralize the larger opportu- 
nity. It is the danger which confronts 
every one to-day in the process of edu- 
cation. The contention is now stoutly 
urged that the schools deliver too late 
into life, therefore the time of preparation 
must be abridged. I take issue, in behalf 
of the ministry, with the premise. As Mr. 
Greeley replied to the man who demanded 
a job of him on the ground that he must 
live, — " That remains to be proven." 



) 



BY EDUCATION 41 

Why should one take less time to enter 
upon those callings which are preceded by 
what is known as an education, than to 
enter upon those callings which are pre- 
ceded by an apprenticeship ? Mark Twain 
has stated the present business situation in 
an aphorism, — " No occupation without 
an apprenticeship ; no pay to the appren- 
tice." In what business may one expect to 
find himself thoroughly established, with 
influence or authority in the firm or cor- 
poration, with a generous income, and pos- 
sessed of a home, while as yet he is within 
the twenties ? Is it in banking, or in man- 
ufacturing, or in railroading, or in general 
trade ? How much farther along is the 
man of business at thirty than the lawyer 
or doctor at that age, unless he has unlim- 
ited capital or is of exceptional capacity? 
The open fact is, that society is growing 
more complicated, its demands are more 
exacting, and consequently personal ad- 
vancement is slower. As surely as the 
rate of interest is declining, so surely are 
* we all coming under the law of diminishing 
returns; which means that for the same re- 
sults we must do harder work or secure a 



42 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

better equipment, which in turn means that 
we must take a longer time in preparation. 
I see no reason, therefore, why a man who 
proposes to enter upon his life work by 
way of an education should complain of 
the time required to prepare for it, and 
especially in view of the fact that the work- 
ing time of life has been greatly extended. 
If society calls a man later to his tasks, 
it allows him to remain longer at them. 
The age of retirement has been advanced. 
Whatever the young man in his impatience 
seems to be losing reappears in the unspent 
force of later years. 

A second result to be expected from 
modern education — I cannot overestimate 
its value to the preacher — is that it can 
give him contact with the mind of his 
time. Without question the minds of men 
are finding their chief training to-day in 
the school of utility. When Thoreau 
graduated at Harvard — it was about sixty 
years ago — he made the statement in his 
graduating address " The world is more 
beautiful than useful.' , That is a state- 
ment which no one could dispute then or 
now. Every one's opinion must depend 



BY EDUCATION 43 

upon his point of view. But whatever 
may have been the proportion in Tho- 
reau's time, it is now evident that where 
one sees real beauty in the world, ten see 
more clearly some kind of utility, and 
without doubt the proportion is increasing. 
Here then is a vast amount of mind to 
be reached, some of it thoroughly trained. 
It does not follow that a preacher must 
therefore become a utilitarian in his think- 
ing. It does not follow that he must use 
the motives which lie on the low plane of 
utility. It does follow that he has an im- 
mense advantage if he knows and under- 
stands through his own training the work- 
ing of this kind of mind. For one thing, 
he will not offend and alienate it by in- 
exact methods of thought. His statements 
will bear verification. His arguments will 
hold true to the laws of evidence. Having 
made contact with the mind thus trained, 
he will be able to move to his own ends. 
Imagination, sentiment, emotion, will not 
be wasted. Exact thinking is not opposed 
to high thinking, nor logic to feeling, nor 
carefulness of speech to the freedom of the 
imagination. 



44 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

I have a practical suggestion to offer to 
our seminaries. I find that there is a con- 
siderable number of men who have been 
trained in the scientific or semi-scientific 
courses in our colleges, who wish as they 
near the close of their college course to 
study for the ministry. Usually they are 
men of assured strength. Their decision 
shows that they are of mature and inde- 
pendent mind. No motive could influ- 
ence men in these conditions except the 
overruling desire to enter the ministry. 
What can be done for them ? They will 
bring strength and consecration to the 
pulpit. They will be a special power in 
bringing the pulpit into contact with the 
type of mind which we have been consid- 
ering. I do not hesitate to ask for a place 
for them in our seminaries, in our best 
seminaries, and that facilities be offered 
them for gaining the necessary technical 
knowledge, especially in Greek. Other- 
wise we shall lose, out of the trained min- 
istry at least, more and more of the best 
mind which our colleges are producing. 

The third result which education ought 
to be expected to give to the preacher is 



BY EDUCATION 45 

the clear and sure access to truth. Not 
possession of it in any large degree, that 
is the work of a lifetime, but access to it. 

I desire, gentlemen, to enter my protest 
and warning in your presence against the 
assumption that truth in any form can be 
had for the asking, that it lies within easy 
reach of the mind. That is never the fact. 
Truth there may be within us or above us, 
written " on the black bosom of the night," 
for the guidance of our feet in plain paths ; 
but that is not enough. The paths of men 
are no longer plain ; they cross and re- 
cross in bewildering confusion ; the world 
thickens; and he who makes too easy a 
thing of duty or of truth only adds in time 
one more bewildered or wayward soul to 
the care of the great shepherd and his 
church. 

In spite of what we rightly call pro- 
gress, in spite of the great and sure gains 
of knowledge, in spite even of revelation, 
nothing is more evident and more impres- 
sive than the remoteness of truth from 
each new age. What is it which calls out 
the finest energy of each new age except 
the search after truth ? This is no pas- 






46 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

time. It is the serious business of serious 
men, lovers of their kind as well as lovers 
of truth. Who are scholars, and what are 
they trying to do ? Men who want to 
know the truth, the whole truth, and no- 
thing but the truth, and who want to have 
their fellow-men know, as they know, that, 
as Descartes said, " they may walk sure- 
footedly in this life." 

It is well to remind ourselves of these 
motives and aims of all true scholars, and 
of the urgent necessities which rest upon 
them, in view of the still remaining atti- 
tude of a part of the church towards its 
most advanced scholarship. We cannot 
do too much to correct the mistake in 
many honest minds, that scholarship cre- 
ates confusion, and introduces doubt 
where before there was faith. And to 
make this correction, we must show how 
simplicity of thought and life has given 
way to complexity, which means that much 
hard, brave, patient thinking must be done 
by somebody in every department of life 
before anybody can act. There never was 
a time when the motto of Governor Win- 
throp, of Massachusetts Bay, was more 



BY EDUCATION 47 

pertinent than now — "When you don't 
know what to do, don't go and do it." 

In fact, it has now become evident that 
there are but two valid positions for the 
church to take, to fall back upon authority 
and go to Rome, or to encourage all clear, 
straight, honest, reverent search after the 
truth. The truth we want and need and 
must have for the ordering of faith and 
the conduct of life is not so accessible that 
we can dispense in the least degree with 
scholarship, unless we are prepared to ac- 
cept authority. The most serious business 
therefore in the education for the minis- 
try is to give to the men who are to as- 
sume its responsibilities access to the truth. 
If there is any distinction between an ed- 
ucated and an uneducated ministry, it is 
here : not simply that one man can use 
better English than another, or quote more 
authors, or answer men with quicker wit, 
but that the educated preacher can give 
light, restore confidence, guide more safely 
and farther, and if need be take command 
when there is a call for a spiritual leader. 

You do not ask me how this access is 
to be gained. You are in the process. 



48 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

I cannot forbear, however, a word as to 
the range of the work. The same kind 
of eager but patient thought is needed 
in every department of theological train- 
ing. The Bible is no more inaccessible 
to us than to our predecessors, when mea- 
sured by the separating effect of language ; 
but it does offer a more arduous task to us, 
since we have undertaken to find its place 
in history, and more than that, to put our- 
selves within its great historic order and 
movement, and let it carry us along accord- 
ing to the providence of God. 

It is no easier task when we turn to 
theology, when we consider either what 
the Bible has to say, or nature. Nature 
seemed to the theologian of the past 
generation simplicity itself. Our fathers 
preached Paley's Natural Theology as 
easily as they preached the Levitical law. 
They may not understand the embarrass- 
ment of those who must now take account 
of the theory of Evolution, but they have 
no right to say to us, after this long and 
pleasant experience in the use of " Paley," 
that the pulpit has no further use for what 
they called natural theology. There is no 
option about the use or disuse of truth. 



BY EDUCATION 49 

And when we turn to our social pro- 
blems, we find ourselves under no less a 
necessity for painstaking and thorough 
study. The difference between the old 
philanthropy and the new, or between the 
lower and the higher, has been well put in 
the statement, " The lower philanthropy 
tries to put right what social conditions 
have put wrong: the higher philanthropy 
-tries to put right the social conditions 
themselves." The difference is immense. 
It is the difference between the charity 
which expresses itself altogether in relief 
and rescue and the charity which expresses 
itself in restraint and precaution, in the 
effort to rescue the rights of the individ- 
ual, and in the greater effort to effect at 
some vital points the readjustment, if not 
the reconstruction, of society. If the good 
is the foe of the best, then it is true that 
there is a sense in which the old-time char- 
ity hurts the new. As Jacob Riis said a 
little time ago in a convention, in which 
the scripture " Charity covereth a multi- 
tude of sins " had been made to do its ac- 
customed work, — " Brethren," speaking 
with his Danish idiom, " it was time to 
take that cover off." 



50 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

Whichever way, then, we turn in our 
present work, we see that education puts 
the newer demands upon us, and offers us 
everywhere the new privileges. We get 
much in method : we get something in 
actual results : we get more in the sense of 
the strain and toil which truth demands, 
no, I will not say demands, but allows, of 
those who are to use it for the good of 
their kind. Is there not an unmistaka- 
ble joy to-day in the companionship of 
scholars, an exultation in the atmosphere 
of scholarship ? 

These three things we ought to ex- 
pect of education as an organized system, 
which takes a man up on his way to the 
ministry: it ought to develop him and 
furnish him as a man, not simply as a 
preacher; it ought to give him contact 
with the mind of his time ; and it ought 
to give him access to the truth ; not the 
means simply, but the strenuous spirit of 
search. 

I would like to devote the remainder 
of this lecture to the somewhat informal 
consideration of certain influences, which, 
though not strictly and technically educa- 



BY EDUCATION 51 

tional, are operative within the period of 
education. 

Among these influences which I have 
in mind, I put first the influence of some 
one person, be he instructor or author, 
upon the mind and heart of a student. 
In the old version, there stood out in the 
margin of the book of Malachi a phrase 
which expresses by a happy turn what I 
want to say. The phrase has been incor- 
porated into the new version, but in the 
change its power as a definition has been 
lost. God was threatening, as one of the 
penalties of disobedience, that He would 
cut off from Israel master and scholar. 
The margin said, " For master and scholar 
read, ' him that awaketh, and him that an- 
swereth.' ' That is the influence I have 
in mind as I speak, the influence of " him 
that awaketh " upon " him that answereth." 
It is something beyond the constant im- 
pression which comes from good teaching. 
It is the spark, which at some fit moment 
is dropped into the nature, which is ready 
to be kindled. 

As these lectures allow personal experi- 
ence, I will recall an illustration from my 



52 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

own life. Near the close of my seminary 
course, when I was in no little doubt about 
the reality of what I had to preach, and 
was therefore hesitating between the law 
and the ministry, I chanced upon the " Life 
and Letters of Robertson." One letter 
which caught my attention contained a 
statement of his personal feeling toward 
Christ. I had never known till then that 
a man could feel in just that way about 
Christ. Here at last was reality. It gave 
me what I wanted. I began at once on my 
own account the study of the life of Christ. 
I began with the temptation, the point I 
judged of greatest reality to him. And 
from that time on I had no question about 
the ministry. Robertson, with his passion- 
ate loyalty to Christ, wakened the answer- 
ing passion in my soul. 

There are many ways in which this 
more personal influence may be expressed. 
One man is able to impart something of 
the quality of his own thought to the 
thinking of those who come under him. 
The virtue which goes out of him lies in 
a certain sentiment which spiritualizes his 
thought. This imparting of the quality or 



BY EDUCATION 53 

sentiment of one's mind may mean more 
in the way of personal influence than a 
founding of a school of disciples. The 
influence of Coleridge was, I judge, of this 
order. It held together many minds which 
differed widely in their theological posi- 
tions. Another form of influence may 
be traced to those who deal in method 
or impression, to those who are distinc- 
tively preachers, whether they are thinkers 
or not. In times just gone by, we recall 
at once Mr. Beecher and Mr. Spurgeon. 
The influence of these men was profoundly 
spiritual and ethical, albeit it produced as 
a secondary result not a little imitation 
on the part of those who could not look 
below their methods into their spirit. But 
the chief influence which comes to us 
from helpful men is that which comes to 
us straight out of their personality. They 
may be thinkers ; they may be distinctively 
preachers: we do not refer to them in 
either capacity: we call them by name. 
So we speak of Maurice, and Robertson, 
and Kingsley, and Bushnell, and Brooks. 
These, and the like, are men who touch 
us, and we are most sensitive to their 



54 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

touch in the days of our preparation for 
the ministry, especially if for any reason 
our thinking or our plans go wrong. 

Next to the stimulus of the " master," 
whoever he may be, I put the contagion 
of the group, — the influence of the as- 
sociated life of which one is a part dur- 
ing the process of education. Education 
in its earlier stages is largely a matter of 
society ; later, in more mature life, it may 
be a matter of isolation. It is good for 
the full-grown man to withdraw at times 
from the city into the desert, unless per- 
chance the city may be to him a place of 
solitude. There are those who are never 
so much alone as when the multitudes 
throng and press. But the fundamental 
idea of the school is the group. A col- 
lege or seminary or university is a society, 
in which the conditions are favorable for 
rare and inspiring fellowships. Great so- 
cial and moral movements have their fre- 
quent origin in these inner groups. Oxford 
alone has given the Wesleys and their 
friends, Newman and Keble and Pusey, 
and Arnold Toynbee and his fellow work- 
ers. Paul lays great stress, you will recall, 



BY EDUCATION 55 

upon the quality of like-mindedness. The 
group is organized around this quality. It 
signifies more than a common disposition 
or taste or liking. It carries with it one- 
ness of aim and purpose and consecration. 
The group guarantees the steady impulse 
and the resolute endeavor. One member 
may lose heart : he has the common faith 
to fall back upon. There are times when 
the individual may have an immense deal 
to give, there are times when he needs to 
make great drafts upon the general fund. 

We are coming to recognize the econ- 
omy of the group in the more exhausting 
forms of moral and religious work. Ser- 
vice in the midst of depressing surround- 
ings must itself be characterized by good 
cheer and steady courage. The constant 
strain upon the sympathies is the test of 
the real significance of living and working 
under wrong social conditions. I doubt if 
one person can well bear the strain. It is 
the group which saves the individual to his 
work, and supplies that fund of good cheer 
which is indispensable to spiritual success. 
The social settlement is founded in the 
idea of the spiritual economy of the group. 



56 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

The settlement has already produced some 
very striking results, but it is contribut- 
ing a principle which, as fast as it may be 
applied, will reinvigorate and gladden all 
lowlier forms of service, wherever the idea 
is practicable. I wish that it could be 
made more practicable among those enter- 
ing the ministry. What it requires on 
their part is the willingness to postpone 
" a call to a church," to delay the home, 
and to give the first years of one's trained 
life to associated work in city or country. 
It is difficult to say where the need is the 
greater. The principle is equally applica- 
ble to the congested wards of a city and 
to the sparser settlements of the country. 
I am confident that a term of service in 
a well-organized and wellrmanned group 
will give one an impulse throughout the 
after ministry for which there is no equiv- 
alent. 

I refer to one other influence, which 
reaches within the period of education and 
is really a part of it, whether we formally 
recognize it or not, namely, the interest 
which attaches to the moral movements of 
one's time. This interest may often seem 



* . 



BY EDUCATION 57 

to be too absorbing for the best intellect- 
ual discipline, but it cannot be, and ought 
not to be, ignored. The educated man 
cannot afford to separate himself from any 
movement which is to affect in vital ways 
his own future, or the future of those with 
whom he may have to do. 

The American church has passed 
through two great moral awakenings, and 
is now passing through a third. What if 
the young men of their generation had not 
heard that first personal call to modern 
missions ! Suppose the now memorable 
and well-nigh accomplished word of Mills 
to his comrades — " We ought to carry the 
gospel to dark and heathen lands, and we 
can do it if we will " — had passed through 
the churches unheeded ; can any one calcu- 
late what the state of religion would have 
been in that generation, or even in this ? 
Or can any one measure the possible moral 
result of a like denial of the anti-slavery 
conflict ? The initiative in this conflict 
can hardly be credited to young men. 
Neither can it be said that the conflict was 
assured till " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was read 
in the homes, and the speeches of Seward 



58 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

and Sumner and Lincoln were read in the 
schools and colleges of the land. The 
present movement in behalf of social right- 
eousness waits in like manner full recogni- 
tion from the young men of the country, es- 
pecially from those in the process of edu- 
cation ; for the movement calls for insight 
and sagacity, as well as for consecration. 
The man who helps here must be both 
trained and consecrated, and training and 
consecration rest alike upon the interest 
which can be awakened. I commend to 
you, in your immediate outlook upon the 
ministry, the utterance of Lyman Beecher 
in his forecast of his own times : " I read 
the signs of the times. I felt as if the 
conversion of the world to Christ was 
near. It was with such views of the future 
that from the beginning I consecrated my- 
self to Christ with special reference to the 
scenes which I saw to be opening upon 
the world. I have never laid out great 
plans. I have always waited, and watched 
the fulfillment of prophecy, and followed 
the leadings of Providence. From the 
beginning my mind has taken in the 
church of God, my country, and the world 



c 



BY EDUCATION 59 

as given to Christ. It is this which has 
widened the scope of my activity beyond 
the common sphere of pastoral labor." 

How far can we educate the preacher ? 
We cannot guarantee the individual man. 
Out of any given number in training for 
the pulpit, one or more will quite surely fail 
to become preachers, though failure will not 
always follow the prediction. But the pro- 
cess will go on to its large results. Educa- 
tion, especially the education which opens 
into the ministry, is an ideal world, in 
which one learns to live till he becomes 
in some sense superior to the world of 
tradition and circumstance and struggle 
which lies before him. It has its own dis- 
cipline, always severe and exacting. It 
allows no interferences with its aims and 
standards. But it is not narrow or arti- 
ficial. It offers the inspiration of the 
master, it introduces the stimulus of the 
group, and it stands open to the moral 
enthusiasm of the age. It is a world by 
no means free from doubts or temptations. 
Not all is gain to those within it. Much 
power has to be expended in resistance to 
dangerous forces which inhere in its very 



60 THE MAKING OF THE PREACHER 

life. But it is a world of great incentives, 
of stirring fellowships, and of honorable 
ambitions. It cannot deliver the preacher, 
but it can present the scholar furnished 
for his task, and the man made ready and 
expectant. 



Ill 

THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

The subject of to-day will carry us alto- 
gether within the life and work of the 
preacher. I am to speak of the forces 
and influences which stand in one way or 
another for his unmaking. The subject 
of my lecture is The Unmaking Process, 
if that can be called a process which may 
have no clear sequence of causes. What 
is cause at one time may be effect at an- 
other time. What is cause with one man 
may be effect with another man. All that 
we can say is that there are influences 
which are continually present to under- 
mine or disintegrate or demoralize the 
preacher. They may be resisted. And 
in so far as they are resisted, the preacher 
has the advantage which always attends 
the successful defense of anything which 
is as sacred as preaching. I do not wish 
to make this lecture a chapter on the moral 



62 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

deterioration of ministers. It will answer 
its purpose if I can expose and set forth 
with the right emphasis some of the more 
subtle influences which are working to undo 
the preacher, or to neutralize his power. 

The foe which lies in wait for the 
preacher from beginning to end is unreal- 
ity. I do not know whether the danger 
is greater at the beginning or at the end, 
but I naturally dwell in your presence 
more upon the danger at the beginning. 
It is always difficult to be real, but never 
more difficult than when one tries at first 
to put all his newly acquired powers to 
use. 

Preaching consists in the right corre- 
spondence between the apprehension and 
the expression of a given truth. The mo- 
rality of preaching lies at this point, just 
where also its effectiveness lies. Preach- 
ing becomes unmoral, if not immoral, when 
the preacher allows the expression of truth 
to go beyond the apprehension of it. This 
is unreality in the pulpit. Doubtless some 
unreal preaching is effective, but never for 
long time. The law is, that the power of 
the pulpit corresponds to the clearness and 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 63 

vividness of the preacher's apprehension 
of truth. The preacher who really believes 
the half truth will have more power than 
the preacher who half believes the truth. 
But it is almost equally true that preach- 
ing may fail for want of adequate expres- 
sion. Hence the occasion for the art of 
sermonizing, or for the art of preaching ; 
the art, that is, of making the expression of 
truth satisfy the apprehension of it. This 
art, because it is an art, has its own moral 
danger. I shall speak of other phases of 
the art in my next lecture, but I now touch 
upon the moral element involved in it. 

Unreality comes into preaching usually 
at one of these three points : First, 
through the commitment of a truth to 
some one faculty exclusively, — to the rea- 
son, or the imagination, or the emotions. 
Logic, as we well know, may lead us into 
the impossible, the unbelievable. The con- 
clusion of the dogma of an arbitrary elec- 
tion in the dogma of infant damnation was 
logical enough, but it could not find accept- 
ance in the category of Christian doctrine. 
It could never gain the consent of any 
other faculty than the logical faculty. Out- 



64 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

side the sphere of logic it was reckoned im- 
possible, unbelievable. The imagination 
and the emotions cannot be trusted alone 
any more than the reason. Things are 
not necessarily true because we want them 
to be true, nor because we can describe 
them as if they were true. Nothing can be 
more unreal than the work of the imagi- 
nation when it is divorced from feeling, or 
when it advances in some directions beyond 
the power of feeling. It is for this reason, 
I suppose, that the descriptions of the fu- 
ture torment of the wicked, as given by the 
old preachers, are as a rule so ineffective. 
They are certainly no more effective than 
the descriptions of the dramatists. But the 
preacher is more closely bound to reality 
than the dramatist, although reality is the 
mark of genuineness in all literature. I 
emphasize the danger of intrusting truth 
to any one faculty. The test of reality is 
the consent of the whole nature. A man 
has no right to say, I believe, unless the 
whole man believes. No creed can live 
which is repeated under the protest of any 
part of the consecrated nature. 

A second point at which unreality may 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 65 

come into the pulpit is through undue 
striving after effect. The motive may be 
right, the preacher wants to get a hearing 
for the truth. When Robert Hall says 
that " miracles were the bell of the uni- 
verse which God rang to call men to hear 
his Son," we see the propriety of the figure. 
Truth must have a hearing. But when we 
take unfit, exaggerated, unscrupulous meth- 
ods to get a hearing for the truth, we rob 
it of its reality. Here is the vice of sensa- 
tionalism. Truth in the hands of a sensa- 
tionalist does not impress us with its reality. 
We discount so much that the little which 
is left is ineffective. It must be the same 
to the man himself who deals in the sen- 
sational method. He cannot take the truth 
seriously, in so far as he is using it for mere 
effect. And all like strivings for effect, 
whether in style of speech or manner of 
delivery, fall under the same charge of un- 
reality. 

And the third point at which danger 
comes in is through undue stimulus from 
an audience. Extempore preachers are 
often charged with rhetorical courage. 
They borrow their courage, the charge is, 



66 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

from the situation. They say things in 
public as they would not say them in 
private, if indeed they would say them at 
all. Rhetorical courage is not necessarily 
unreal courage. One may legitimately do 
that on an occasion which he could not 
do without the occasion. We must give 
a large liberty to public utterance. That 
may be perfectly real to one in the pre- 
sence of men, and under the common feel- 
ing when once it is awakened, which could 
not be real in the same degree to one when 
alone. Still it is a part of the spiritual obli- 
gation of the preacher not to be dependent 
for the reality of great truths upon the oc- 
casional excitement. He is to be the stead- 
ier force among men. He is to make the 
positive, as Mr. Emerson says, stronger 
than the superlative. He ought to have 
no need of exaggeration. He must never 
allow himself to utter as truths any of 
those sentiments which cannot be verified 
to some degree in the common experience. 
These are the dangers which threaten 
the preacher at the beginning. They all 
come from the failure to get the right cor- 
respondence between the apprehension of 



\ 
\ 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 67 

truth and the expression of it. I do not 
say that they are greater at the begin- 
ning of one's work than at the end. The 
young preacher may want to express too 
much. The older preacher may not dare 
, to express enough. Certainly, if conserva- 
tism is the mark of age, it has its dangers. 
There is a saving of truth which is a los- 
ing, a fear for the truth which comes to be 
a distrust of it. The ultra conservatism of 
the pulpit which stands more and more for 
the defense of truth, whose chief concern 
is that the truth shall suffer no harm, makes 
the preacher himself less and less an out- 
going force. He, too, becomes unreal, be- 
cause he no longer comes up to the measure 
of the truth. 

Next to the danger of the preacher from 
unreality, I put the danger which comes 
from the want of direct and wholesome 
criticism. Criticism of a certain sort there 
is in abundance, but it never reaches the 
preacher's ears. For aught he knows, un- 
less he is a man of rare insight, he is ex- 
empt from criticism. Contrast his situation 
with that of the young advocate, who makes 
his plea before the jury in the presence of 



68 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

an alert antagonist, or even with that of the 
young author, who waits the word of the 
reviewer. The want of an open antagonist 
or critic is, I think, the greatest disadvan- 
tage of an intellectual sort from which the 
pulpit suffers. 

When Mr. Webster was at Marshfield, 
an old friend said to him, " Mr. Webster, 
were you ever practically helped by any- 
body in forming your style ? " " Yes," Mr. 
Webster answered at once. " Soon after I 
was admitted to the bar, I gave a Fourth of 
July oration at Portsmouth. The editor of 
a magazine in Philadelphia published the 
oration with a running comment upon it. 
Taking it up part by part, he said : * This 
passage shows good reasoning ; here is a bit 
of eloquence; but here is a lot of rhetoric, 
mere wording. If the speaker cannot learn 
to use simple and sincere language, he can 
never be the orator for the common peo- 
ple.' I read that criticism over and 
over," Mr. Webster said, " and finally con- 
cluded that if I was to get my living by 
talking to plain people, I must have a plain 
style." 

How invaluable a just and competent 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 69 

critic would be to a young preacher. But 
instead of that the average preacher has 
much to fear from flattering tongues. Few 
men are insensible to flattery. And preach- 
ers are more liable, not susceptible, to this 
enervating experience than any other class 
of men, with the possible exception of ac- 
tors. I wonder at the liberties which men 
and women take in this regard with the 
preacher. They seem to assume that the 

- preacher is a non-resistant. Appreciation 
is a virtue. There is none too much of it. 
It is not only grateful, it may be inspiring. 
But flattery, or mere compliment, or even 
unthinking acquiescence, each and all are 
enervating to the last degree. As far as 
they have an effect, they hold the preacher 
to his lower levels. Far better the stimu- 
lus, the spur, if need be, the goad. I count 
it the sure mark of deterioration when one 
begins to be content and satisfied with 
himself, because others, it matters not 
whether they be few or many, are appar- 
ently satisfied with him, and say so. In 
the absence of open criticism the preacher 

• must learn how to interpret facts which 
stand for criticism. Absence is criticism ; 



70 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

inattention is criticism ; unresponsiveness 
is criticism ; and the failure to secure ap- 
preciable results may be criticism. The 
preacher is the last man who can afford 
to ignore or misinterpret facts which have 
a bearing on his personal or professional 
growths. 

You will not be surprised when I remind 
you that the preacher has much to fear 
from the dissipation of personal energy. A 
very competent authority, himself enough 
on the inside to observe, has said that the 
two besetting sins of the ministry are lazi- 
ness and lying. By lying he means the 
essential thing about which we have been 
talking under the name of unreality. But 
by laziness he means, I take it, the disposi- 
tion or the willingness to do the lesser in 
place of the greater duty. This is the subtle 
refinement of laziness always and every- 
where, the postponement of the hard and 
exacting duty beyond the one which is 
easier and more agreeable. The minister 
has an unwonted range of duties. Every 
day gives a large choice. He can satisfy his 
conscience by keeping at work indiscrimi- 
nately. He can be the busiest man in town, 



\ » 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 71 

and yet leave his great task undone. He is 
simply working out of proportion. He can 
do this ; few other men can. And every 
preacher is working out of proportion when 
he does not make preaching the one high, 
commanding, inspiring duty of his life. I 
do not underestimate the exactions or the 
joys which belong to the pastorate. But I 
do say that the imperative obligation of the 
minister is to his pulpit. And when dis- 
tractions multiply and duties apparently 
conflict, he ought to be able to hear, and 
to know that he must obey, the mandate of 
the pulpit, — " Enter into thy closet and 
shut thy door." 

No, I do not mean this literally. I com- 
mend to you the necessity to the preacher 
of the power of mental abstraction. A 
preacher cannot altogether control time 
or place. He ought not to expect to do 
this. He must make allowance for inter- 
ruptions. As Dr. Payson used to say, 
" The man who wants to see me is the 
man whom I want to see," a rule of pre- 
sent application, barring book agents and 
college presidents. The preacher who 
excludes himself from men in the time 



72 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

of their want or necessity is the preacher 
whose sermons will in time betray this 
seclusion. What, then, is the preacher's 
defense ? The power of concentration or 
of abstraction, the power to hold a subject 
in thought and in heart under interruption 
or in the midst of distracting influences. 
A preacher ought to consider it one part 
of his mental training to make himself 
reasonably independent of conditions. He 
ought to be able to work on a train, if he 
has elbow room, not perhaps as well, but 
as resolutely, as in his study. He ought 
to be able to think clearly and calmly, or 
clearly and passionately, in the midst of 
alien surroundings, as well as when he is 
within reach of his favorite authors, pro- 
vided of course he does not need to con- 
sult them. 

And beyond this consecration of the 
preacher to the pulpit, I advise strongly 
that a preacher seek first and above all 
things to gain a secure standing in his 
own pulpit. No people have the like 
claim upon him with his own people ; and 
no causes have a like claim upon him at 
the beginning with the cause for which his 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 73 

own pulpit stands. Later I shall have 
occasion to speak of the growing range 
of a preacher's activity, but at the first, a 
preacher has the imperative duty, which 
he owes alike to himself and to his people, 
of concentrating upon his own pulpit. I 
commend the example of Dr. Gordon at 
the opening of his pastorate at the Old 
South Church, Boston, who resolved that 
for three years he would make no public 
addresses. He kept his resolution. To- 
day he has the freedom of the country. 

There is a very strong though subtle 
influence which is at work toward the un- 
making of the preacher, coming up out of 
the social situation. The social situation 
is continually thrusting the question into 
the preacher's face, How much ought you 
to sacrifice for the people about you, most 
of whom are in circumstances of comfort, 
a few in circumstances of luxury? If he 
were a pioneer in a new country, or if he 
were a missionary among some peoples, 
this question would not arise. A part of 
the heroism of the missionary in distinc- 
tion from the routine of the parish min- 
ister lies in the social sacrifice. There is 



74 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

evident need of that sacrifice. Hardship, 
privation, possibly suffering, show the price 
of his consecration. But why should a 
minister, the insidious question will surely 
arise, whose lot is cast in the midst of 
social plenty and refinement, — why should 
he sacrifice anything ? and if he is to make 
no sacrifice, why should he not want and 
expect the many and various privileges for 
which society stands ? The question be- 
comes a very absorbing one when once it 
begins to enter seriously into the thought 
of a minister, or into the thought of his 
family. And there is no end to its per- 
plexities. It has more power of petty dis- 
tractions than all other questions put to- 
gether. The Presbyterian Church seems 
to have settled the difficulty in the terms 
of the call which a local church extends to 
a pastor. The call runs in this wise : — 

" And that you may be free from worldly 
cares and avocations, we hereby promise 
and oblige ourselves to pay to you the 

sum of in regular quarterly (or half 

yearly, or yearly) payments, during the 
time of your being and continuing the 
regular pastor of this church." 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 75 

This seems to settle the question; but 
if the terms of a call are freely met, this 
would be far from a settlement of the diffi- 
culties of the social situation. The salaries 
of ministers are graduated everywhere very 
closely to ordinary expense. They are in 
this respect like the salaries of teachers 
and professors, or for that matter like the 
salaries of congressmen and judges, the 
salaries of any persons outside the com- 
mercial classes. But the wants of a min- 
ister and his family are the same with 
those of the average members of the com- 

e munity in which they live. Their tastes 
are probably rather above the average, and 
beyond these lies the appeal of ambition 
and privilege and opportunity. 

What, now, can the preacher do ? I say 
unhesitatingly he must accept in the main 

. the social situation as it is, and find his 
satisfying compensations in the peculiar 
aims and opportunities of his work. By 
this I do not mean that the business side 
of the ministry is to be made light of. It 
is one of the first duties of a minister to 
see that a parish gives for its own uses up 
to the full limit of self-respect. Nothing 



76 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

is gained to charity, but everything is 
lost, by condoning with stinginess. That 
parish will give most to foreign missions 
which is trained to meet its own obliga- 
tions to the full. But when this has been 
done, I know of nothing further to be done 
except for a preacher to turn himself with 
contentment and satisfaction to his work. 
He cannot work under a social grievance. 
He cannot preach and complain. But a 
great many preachers are complaining. I 
think that there is more complaint in the 
ministry than in any other profession or 
calling ; and of the various branches of the 
church, I think that there is the most rest- 
lessness and complaint in the Congrega- 
tional ministry. The Methodist system 
determines a preacher's lot and in part, at 
least, his disposition toward it. The Epis- 
copal ideal supports the minister through 
the dignity and separateness of his position. 
The Congregational ministry is essentially 
democratic. That means that it feels the 
strain of social equality. The very spirit 
which, as I shall show you by and by, makes 
it difficult for us to maintain our churches 
in certain localities, makes it difficult to 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 77 

maintain our ministers in a state of mind 
reasonably free from social competitions 
and embarrassments. And therefore I ap- 
prise you in advance of the peculiar danger 
from this source. 

Let me go a step further in the same 
direction and speak of the loss of power 
to the preacher from frequent changes. I 
conceive that the shortness and change- 
ableness of the pastorate are doing a great 
deal at present toward the unmaking of 
the preacher. I know that there are two 
sides to this matter; and especially that 
it may seem to have a different aspect as 
one looks at it from the side of the min- 
ister or of the congregation. It is, I be- 
lieve, among the traditions of this place, 
that when a student asked Mr. Beecher, 
" What was the special reason for short 
pastorates," he got the quick reply, "The 
mercy of God." 

Permanency in the pastorate, other 
things being equal, is a tremendous source 
of power to the pulpit. It gives the 
preacher the advantage of the accumula- 
tions in his personality. The old rhetori- 
cians used to say that one office of an 



78 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

/ introduction was to present the speaker 
and gain acceptance for him with his audi- 
ence. The preacher, who rises in the pul- 
pit after years of preaching, is a known 
man, and if known probably honored and 
loved. If he has shown intellectual ad- 
vance, the congregation is expectant of 
more truth. When he applies that in 
hand, his wisdom in the past enforces his 
application. And when he appeals to his 
people, every influence from character and 
association and personal kindness and sac- 
rifice goes with the appeal. 

There is but one valid argument on the 
other side, speaking now in the interest 
of the truth, of which I am aware. It is 
the argument from freshness, the chance 
for the new truth or the new setting of it. 
But this all depends upon the question as 
to whether the preacher's past is for him 
or against him. If he cannot improve 
upon that, if he repeats himself, if he is no 
more to the truth than formerly, then he 
ought to go. But if he can keep himself 
abreast of truth, continually in advance of 
his people, and maintain the good cheer 
and enthusiasm of his personal faith, then 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 79 

he ought to stay, so far as the interests of 
truth are concerned. J 

And now about other interests, and espe- 
cially about that of the preacher himself. 
The community, it goes without saying, is 
usually the loser when a man is called 
away under the urgent solicitation of an- 
other parish. If this were not the case, 
calls from one parish to another would be 
very scarce. But how about the minister 
himself? It must be true that the man 
who is under frequent call to leave his par- 
ish can afford to stay. At least, he need 
not fear lest the last opportunity has come 
to him. But can he satisfy the proper 
demand for what may be the larger field ? 
Let him ask himself if he has enlarged his 
field to the utmost. Has he pushed out 
into all legitimate relations to other fields 
of work entirely germane to the preacher ? 
One of the most popular of our younger 
preachers has declined a call to a large city 
on the ground, in part, that his influence is 
extending into the colleges, and that he 
cannot afford to forego that extension of 
his ministry. That fact suggests one of the 
new sources of pulpit power. Every board 



80 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

of preachers in the colleges makes ten men 
necessary where one served for the place 
a generation ago. The work of the pulpit 
is growing more intensive and extensive. 
Preaching has to be clearer and more 
direct, more to the point, than ever before. 
And it has to do with wider relations. I 
am very careful about advising interfer- 
ence with social and semi-political issues 
till one is thoroughly trained and prepared 
for such business. But this outer ministry 
has a place in every tried, enlarged, influen- 
tial pastorate, provided the preacher shows 
personal aptitude. I see no need of fre- 
quent changes of pastorate, in the interest 
of freshness, either to preacher or people, if 
the preacher will use all his opportunities 
to keep himself in close and quickening 
relations to truth and men. I cannot 
overestimate the power to the pulpit of 
men whose personality has begun to count 
for something before the public. Usu- 
ally this power comes from men who are 
placed. They are institutions. What mat- 
ters it just where the preacher is, if when 
he speaks he gets the wider hearing, if the 
book he prints is read, if the cause he 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 81 

advocates is forwarded, if the inspiration 
of his life and work goes out from heart to 
heart. I am not saying that a man should 
stay always where he begins, though I 
think he ought to stay long enough to pay 
the people for having taught him his ap- 
prenticeship; but I am protesting against 
the restlessness which comes with so great 
frequency of change in the pastorate. 
Greater permanency would, I am sure, give 
us better churches and better preachers. 

One of the chief sources of discourage- 
ment in one's early ministry is disappoint- 
ment in men. This disappointment does 
not usually extend to loss of faith in human 
nature, though a tendency to generalize 
from a few particular cases of disappoint- 
ment is very strong, and the result in such 
instances very disheartening. Whenever 
the result is suspicion, distrust, or personal 
bitterness, a preacher's power is greatly 
lessened, and sometimes utterly lost. But 
the danger which I now have in mind, 
while less, is enhanced by the fact that it 
comes to one early. I recall with gratitude 
the advice which I received as a younger 
man from the Hon. Alpheus Hardy, of 



82 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

Boston, " Don't expect too much of men." 
No layman within my knowledge had 
higher standards than he. No man had 
a more scrupulous sense of honor in busi- 
ness or a broader sense of public obliga- 
tion. But his words were wise. I have 
had frequent occasion to prove their mean- 
ing. Men at large are not only under 
greater temptations than we may suppose, 
but they are under greater restrictions in 
the matter of right doing than we may sup- 
pose. I think that the pulpit often lays a 
burden on the individual man which ought 
to be shared by society. The preacher is 
continually saying to the man in business 
or politics, or in any of the departments of 
worldly struggle, repent, repent. And the 
call is none too strong. But, on the other 
hand, what if the individual man replies, 
as he does by his silence and neglect, 
" How can I repent ? how can I repent 
alone? I represent my calling, my busi- 
ness, my party, my sect. When you ask 
me to repent, you virtually ask me to leave 
my business or calling or party or sect. 
For when I have done all that I can to 
reform the situation of which I am a part, 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS S3 

I am still a party to very much which you 
condemn and which I disapprove." 

Here lies the argument to-day, gentle- 
men, for the training of the social con- 
science. I do not say that we have no 
right to urge individual repentance, and 
works meet for repentance, but I do say 
that we have no right to expect the full 
• and proper response to our message till 
\ we have made the conditions more nearly 
possible for personal righteousness. The 
call to repentance which we send out must 
be addressed to the church, to society, to 
every calling and business which ought 
to listen and obey. We ought to make 
it harder for men to sin and more possi- 
ble, if not easier, for men to be righteous. 
Meanwhile, let us not be disappointed in 
men, if we can see discontent and struggle 
on their part. Let us incorporate every 
gain in personal righteousness into public 
sentiment. We do not need to-day mere 
come-outers ; we need men who will help 
from within, men who will leave their busi- 
ness or profession, and society and the 
state and the church, safer places to live 
in than when they found them. 



84 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

I am not intending to speak in this lec- 
ture, or at any time, about the great lapses 
from faith or from righteousness or from 
God, which completely undo the preacher. 
They are self-evident in their application. 
I speak only the passing word about the 
effect of intellectual doubt upon the power 
of the preacher. The effect of doubt de- 
pends upon the kind of doubt. There is 
a doubt which is utterly demoralizing. 
There is a doubt which is a challenge to 
sincere and brave souls. Who questions 
the effect of doubt on the soul of Robert- 
son ? What mighty and passionate sym- 
pathies it gave him with humanity. What 
depth of view it gave him into the heart of 
truth. How near it brought him to the 
personal Christ. Doubt of such a nature, 
and it is the only kind worthy of a strong 
and sane man, may have an incalculable 
power for good. It may lead the way into 
reality. When the darkness is spent, it is 
the true light which shineth. 

The most serious danger to the preacher 
must of course come from himself. I can- 
not make clear all the ways in which it 
will become real to you. But there is one 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 85 

aspect of the danger which I cannot over- 
look, because it grows with the true growth 
and success of the preacher. The longer 
one lives, the harder one works, the better 
in some senses the results of his preach- 
ing, the farther apart the man seems to 
himself to be from the truth he utters. 
I do not see how it can be otherwise. 
Ideals must outstrip the reality. The in- 
creasing brightness of the truth brings 
out more clearly personal deficiencies and 
shortcomings. In the very joy of preach- 
ing there may come in upon one the sense 
of personal unworthiness which is over- 
whelming. The success which one may 
gain may seem to him to have a lower in- 
terpretation. He cannot accept the ver- 
dict of the hour. He anticipates a diviner 
judgment, which may be a reversal of that 
which has apparently been rendered. I 
am about to read you an extract from one 
of the greatest, — it is altogether the most 
searching sermon of the last generation, 
that of Canon Mozley on the Reversal 
of Human Judgment. I count each year 
in especial danger which has not felt the 
tonic of its words. 



86 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

" Suppose any supernatural judge should 
appear in the world now, it is evident the 
scene he would create would be one to 
startle us ; we should not soon be used 
to it ; it would shock and appall ; and that 
from no other cause than simply its reduc- 
tions ; that it presented characters stripped 
bare, denuded of what was irrelevant to 
goodness, and only with their moral sub- 
stance left. The judge would take no cog- 
nizance of a rich imagination, power of 
language, poetical gifts, and the like, in 
themselves, as parts of goodness, any more 
than he would of richness and prosperity ; 
and the moral residuum left would appear 
perhaps a bare result. The first look of 
divine justice would strike us as injustice ; 
it would be too pure a justice for us ; we 
should be long in reconciling ourselves to 
it. Justice would appear, like the painter's 
gaunt skeleton of emblematic meaning, to 
be stalking through the world, smiting 
with attenuation luxuriating forms of vir- 
tue. Forms, changed from what we knew, 
would meet us, strange, unaccustomed 
forms, and we would have to ask them 
who they were, — 'You were flourishing 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 87 

but a short while ago, what has happened 
to you now ? ' And the answer, if it spoke 
the truth, would be, ' Nothing, except that 
now much which lately counted as good- 
ness counts as such no longer ; we are 
tried by a new moral measure, out of 
which we issue different men ; gifts which 
have figured as goodness remain as gifts, 
but cease to be goodness.' Thus would 
the large sweep made of human canoniza- 
tions act like blight or volcanic fire upon 
some rich landscape, converting the luxury 
of nature into a dried-up scene of bare 
stems and scorched vegetation." 

Sometimes I say, Yes, more and more, 
this sense of dissatisfaction with personal 
gifts, this sense of their danger as substi- 
tutes for plain and simple righteousness, 
finds a place in the heart of the preacher. 
It is perhaps as much a sign of the true 
spirit and of the growing reality, as the 
trembling knee is the inseparable sign of 
eloquence. The preacher has the right to 
know that humility is the one sure posses- 
sion which gives him entrance into the 
high places of his high calling. 



88 THE UNMAKING PROCESS 

" Humble must be if to heaven we go, 
High is the roof there, but the gate is low." 

I once asked Dr. Philip Schaff to preach 
for me. As we passed through the door- 
way near, the foot of the pulpit stairs, he 
turned to me and said, " Don't you always 
feel humble when you go through this 
door ? ' I knew at least that he felt what 
he said, and I knew that, though he was 
not distinctively a preacher, we should 
have that day great preaching, and we 
had it. 

The safety of the preacher, the safe- 
guard from himself, lies in the growth of 
humility. All God's chosen ones have 
had it. It is the sure and fine quality 
which underlies their natures. It explains 
their shrinkings from duty, their hesita- 
tions and reluctance. It was the ground 
of Moses' protest, — " Who am I that I 
should go in unto Pharaoh ? " of Isaiah's 
despair, — "I am undone, because I am 
a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the 
midst of a people of unclean lips : " of 
Jeremiah's shrinking, — " Ah, Lord God, 
I am but a child : " of the abasement and 
of the exaltation of Paul, — " I am the least 



THE UNMAKING PROCESS 89 

of the apostles ; I am not worthy to be 
called an apostle." " I can do all things 
through Christ which strengtheneth me." 

Gentlemen, there is no fellowship so 
great or safe or assuring as that into 
which we enter through humility. 



IV 

THE PREACHER AND HIS ART 

In a course of lectures like the present, 
which has to do altogether with the person- 
ality of the preacher, due account must 
be made of those influences coming from 
his work or from his surroundings, which 
are to his harm, influences which, if unde- 
tected and unrestrained, will soon or late 
reach the man himself, and take the heart 
out of his preaching. So we gave up the 
lecture of yesterday to the consideration 
of influences of this nature. I confess to 
you that it is with a sense of relief that 
I turn again to those constructive forces 
and habits in which we find the guarantee 
of the safety and power of the preacher. 

I have, however, a misgiving about the 
lecture of to-day. It will take me, beyond 
any other lecture of the course, into the 
immediate province of the class room. I 
do not know how this can be helped ; but I 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ART 91 

find no little satisfaction in remembering 
that if by any chance my opinions should 
not coincide with those of the department, 
no greater harm will come to you than this 
waste of words. I say in advance, gentle- 
men, that the work of the department is 
the essential thing, not the casual utterance 
of a lecturer. A special train may be gen- 
erously given the right of way for a trip, 
but it is of very little account compared 
with the regular travel and traffic for which 
the road was built, and which support it. 

The subject of to-day is the Preacher, 
considered as an Artist. 

There is no reaction upon a preacher 
like that from his work. That creates a 
habit. In the lecture of yesterday, I spoke 
of the morality of preaching as consisting 
in the right correspondence between the 
apprehension of truth and the expression 
of it. Preaching becomes unmoral, if not 
immoral, when the expression of a truth is 
beyond the apprehension of it. Then the 
preacher crosses over the line into unreal- 
ity. But I also said that the effectiveness 
of preaching lies in this same correspond- 
ence. It is just as necessary that the 



92 THE PREACHER 

expression of truth should satisfy the ap- 
prehension or realization of it, as that the 
expression should not surpass the realiza- 
tion. When the attempt is made to com- 
municate more truth than one has in actual 
possession, or when feeling is simulated, 
preaching becomes, so far as the preacher 
is concerned, an immorality. But this is 
not the danger of the majority of preachers, 
certainly not at the beginning. The dan- 
ger then is that the preacher will not com- 
municate the truth he has, or express the 
feeling which he actually entertains towards 
it. Hence the occasion for the art of 
preaching or sermonizing, the art of mak- 
ing the communication of truth satisfy the 
personal apprehension of it. In so far, 
therefore, as preaching is an art, the 
preacher is an artist, and ought to have 
the conscience of an artist ; conscience, 
I say, for conscience is just as much con- 
cerned with the communication of truth 
as it is with the search after it. The con- 
science of the preacher as an inquirer or 
believer is never at variance with the con- 
science of the preacher when he is doing his 
work as an artist, and never demands that 



AND HIS ART 93 

this work shall take a subordinate place. 
This is the fundamental position of the 
present lecture; and if any one is not pre- 
pared to accept it in full, then I cannot 
expect to convince him of the moral sig- 
nificance of the subject of to-day to the 
present course of lectures. 

The preacher, considered as an artist, is 
to be judged by his use of method, by his 
sense of proportion, by his style, and by the 
tone of his preaching. 

There are two, and, as it seems to me, 
but two, perfectly natural methods of 
preaching. One where the sermon is 
prepared for extempore speech, the other 
where the sermon is written to be read. 
Between these lie two other methods in 
common use, entirely legitimate, in them- 
selves forcible, and probably best adapted 
to the average preacher, — the memoriter 
method, and that of the sermon written to 
be delivered. I will give a brief characteri- 
zation of each method for our present uses. 

The characteristic of the extempore 
method, as I view it, is that the mind of 
the preacher remains in the creative mood 
throughout the delivery of the sermon. 



94 THE PREACHER 

The ordinary definitions of extempore 
speech do not satisfy this conception, as 
when it is said that the " extempore 
speaker knows what he will say, he does 
not know how he will say it ; " or that 
" the extempore preacher enters the pul- 
pit as the writer takes his pen to write." 
These definitions ignore the idea of the 
creative energy as still active under the 
process of speaking. The true conception 
of extempore preaching is that the preacher 
enters the pulpit before the creative fires, 
the fires which kindle thought, have been 
put out. The preacher is still in heat when 
he enters the pulpit. The mind is in its 
most intense activity, and therefore clear- 
est and most discriminating in its action. 
The sermon has been thoroughly prepared, 
that is, thought out, otherwise it would be 
an example of mere impromptu preaching ; 
but something of the material in mind 
may be rejected, and other material may be 
added. The genuine extempore preacher 
does not know just how the truth will pos- 
sess him as he stands before men ; he does 
not know what his audience will have to 
say about it. It is this unknown element 



AND HIS ART 95 

which enters into and determines the best 
extempore preaching. The best extempore 
sermons, I do not say the average of them, 
but the best, never could have been en- 
tirely prepared in the study. The extem- 
pore preacher who is such by clear distinc- 
, , tion usually thinks his best thoughts in 
the presence of men. Without the stimu- 
lus of their presence, these thoughts would 
not have been conceived. They are born 
of the quick contact of the mind of the 
preacher with the mind of the audience. 
There is a just sense in which they belong 
to the audience as well as to the preacher. 
The extempore preacher must of course be 
prepared to preach without these partially 
extraneous aids : then we have ordinary 
preaching. He must be prepared to wel- 
come and utilize them : then we have ex- 
traordinary extempore preaching. 

It is hardly necessary to say that 
this distinction separates the extempore 
preacher entirely from the merely ready 
preacher or the fluent preacher or, accord- 
ing to the old parlance* the unwearied 
preacher. He belongs to another genus. 
Fluency is the greatest foe to true extern- 



96 THE PREACHER 

pore preaching. The fluent, easy, self- 
satisfied talker has none of the stuff in him 
of which extempore preachers are made. 

In the memoriter method, or that of the 
sermon written to be delivered, — they are 
alike in principle, — the preacher forecasts 
as far as possible the situation ; he prepares 
his sermon with his audience before him in 
imagination ; he thinks how he will utter 
the given truth in their presence ; and hav- 
ing prepared the sermon in thought and 
feeling to the best of his power, he com- 
mits it, in the one case to memory, and in 
the other case to manuscript. The memo- 
riter preacher has a considerable advantage 
in ready contact with his audience, in the 
use of eye and gesture ; the preacher from 
manuscript may have the advantage of 
using his manuscript as an instrument, an 
instrument of great accuracy and preci- 
sion. A preacher from manuscript should 
never be ashamed of his manuscript. He 
should make his audience feel that it is a 
source of power, that it is an effective in- 
strument in his hands. Preaching from 
manuscript, it is to be remembered, is in 
itself an art. As Dr. William M. Taylor 



AND HIS ART 97 

has said, in speaking of the change in his 
own case from the memoriter method, 
" One must educate himself to the free and 
unfettered use of the full manuscript." 
But both the manuscript sermon and the 
sermon written to be delivered are in their 
intention oratorical. The preacher is the 
orator, so far as he may be, in his study ; 
he tries to put his feeling as well as his 
thought into the care of his memory or of 
his manuscript, and then to recover them in 
the presence of his audience, a fact which 
explains clearly enough, I think, what I 
meant when I said that either method, 
though extremely forcible in itself, is by 
comparison with the extempore method 
unnatural. The aim being oratorical, the 
method is not so true to the aim. 

The sermon written to be read is by dis- 
tinction literary. It is not written to be 
delivered, it is written to be read. The 
action is not in the man speaking as the 
orator, the action is in the style. The 
style is terse, vivid, axiomatic, picturesque, 
vital in word as well as in thought, and 
everywhere pervaded by the imagination. 
Mere smoothness of diction is as fatal to 



98 THE PREACHER 

this method as is fluency to the extempore 
method. Every sentence has its own car- 
rying power. Gesture may be used, but it 
helps very little. The use of the eye is 
not necessary. I heard a preacher some 
twenty years ago, a young man then, now 
unhappily no longer in the pulpit, read a 
sermon of this type without lifting his eyes 
from the manuscript, but I doubt if any 
one in the large audience took his eyes off 
the preacher. This method, though not 
absolutely natural, is relatively natural. It 
is true to its aim. Its aim is the best ex- 
pression of a truth through the most effec- 
tive literary qualities. The literary aim 
allows the literary method of presentation, 
that is, reading. 

Now while these methods differ, as I 
conceive, at the points I have named, they 
all have the great and essential qualities of 
the sermon in common. A sermon must 
be a sermon m any and all conceivable cir- 
cumstances, as a plea must be a plea, or an 
essay an essay, or a poem a poem. But in 
the choice of a method, and in the adapta- 
tion of it to his own powers, the preacher 
is the artist. There lies a considerable part 



AND HIS ART 99 

of the responsibility in relation to any art. 
And the choice is not to be quickly settled. 
For this reason I would advise the method 
of the sermon written to be delivered to 
begin with, as the one which secures the 
best immediate results, and from which one 
can pass into the method of the extempore 
or written sermon, should one feel that he 
is capable of making the change. The 
memoriter method, if one has a reliable 
memory, has the advantage of direct ap- 
proach to an audience. The danger of the 
method is declamation, than which nothing 
can be more out of place in the pulpit. 

But if one is to become the extempore 
preacher, or the preacher of the sermon 
written to be read, he must enter into long 
and resolute training; especially in case 
of training for extempore preaching, he 
must put himself under inexorable safe- 
guards against uncertainty in thought, un- 
evenness in temperament, diff useness in lan- 
guage, — the fluent man, I repeat, should \ 
never become the extempore preacher, — 
against repetition and monotony in the 
choice of subjects, the overworking of 
words and phrases, overstatement, undue 



.1 ' ^ 

> > 



ioo THE PREACHER 

familiarity with an audience, and various 
other dangers of like nature too many to 
be enumerated. He must subject himself 
to a training which is positive and continu- 
ous ; and when he has his method well in 
hand, then he will beware most lest through 
overconfidence he lets in some of the vices 
which will destroy its power. But the end, 
as indeed the end to be reached by any 
method, is worthy of the struggle. Just so 
far as conscience goes into the task, just so 
far may one take to himself the joy of his 
conscience in the result. 

Proportion in the sermon reveals the ar- 
tist in the preacher more even than his use 
of method. A sermon proceeding upon 
any method must have proportion. It is 
the artistic test. I once heard a sermon 
from a very able man on the hidings of 
God's power. These hidings, the preacher 
said, were to be found in history, in provi- 
dence, and in grace. It took the preacher 
thirty minutes to find them in history, ten 
minutes to find them in providence, and 
three minutes to find them in grace. The 
element of time, considering the sermon as 
a whole, enters into the question of propor- 



AND HIS ART 101 

tion. A preacher must determine how long 
a given truth, under his presentation of it, 
can hold an audience for the best impres- 
sion, not how long an audience will stay and 
return another Sunday. The arrangement 
of a sermon has a great deal to do with 
the impression of time. Some preachers 
frighten an audience at the outset by the 
way in which they lay out a sermon, even 
when the fear is not justified by the actual 
time taken. I have in mind a preacher who 
lays out his sermon for an hour, but he 
always stops inside thirty minutes. I sup- 
pose it may have been a man of this type 
who raised in the mind of Sydney Smith 
the horrible suspicion, which he communi- 
cated to his neighbor in the pew — " You 
don't suppose, do you, that the man has 
forgotten the end ? " 

Proportion demands of the preacher that 
he shall always choose a manageable sub- 
ject, and this means sometimes that he 
shall leave a subject alone, it may be for 
years, until it becomes manageable. A 
manageable subject is one which can be 
presented in its wholeness. Wholeness 
requires unity, but it is more than unity. 



102 THE PREACHER 

It is bringing the weight of the subject to 
bear, not in fragments, but as a whole. 
Proportion calls for emphasis in the dis- 
tinction of parts. Equality of treatment 
measured in time and space may be a false 
equality. One part may be made emphatic 
by the simple statement of it; another part 
requires full and elaborate treatment. Pro- 
portion is not a matter of outline. It is a 
matter of impression. When a thought 
has done its work, then the next. Or to 
change from the figure of structure, which 
always restricts the thought of proportion, 
let me say that the characteristic of a ser- 
mon from beginning to end is movement, 
progress. You can test the sermon at any 
point by this characteristic. There is no 
such thing, for example, as the introduc- 
tion to a subject. Introduction is a part of 
the subject. It is that part which invites 
entrance. Once within, the mind is car- 
ried along by the preacher, now by argu- 
ment, now by illustration, now by appeal, 
but always carried along. At any given 
moment the listener is not where he was 
the moment before. And when the end 
comes, one knows that he has been under 



AND HIS ART 103 

motion. A sermon that has had move- 
ment cannot stop without creating this 
feeling in an audience, even if it has not 
been apparent before. The stillness which 
has prevailed gives way to the movement 
of relief. The tension is broken. 

Under whatever figure you consider the 
idea of proportion, it comes to the same 
thing. The preacher has given the right 
amount of truth for the end sought, he has 
kept its unity, he has left it with an impres- 
sion which does justice to the truth as a 
whole. And meanwhile the appropriate 
effect is to be seen in the audience. The 
audience is brought to a conclusion, not the 
sermon simply, or the truth. " Preaching," 
according to one of the best definitions of 
it of which I have knowledge, " is making 
men think, and feel as they think, and act 
as they feel." 

The pulpit, as much as any agency of 
public speech, places insistence upon style. 
The truth in itself, however true it may be, 
will not insure the preacher a hearing. It 
is in preaching as in all good speech, the 
truth, plus the man, plus the style. The 
pulpit, however, insists upon no particular 



104 THE PREACHER 

style. It has no style of its own. The at- 
tempt to create something distinctive and 
peculiar in this regard always results in 
unnaturalness, the worst possible vice in 
preaching. What the pulpit demands, and 
all that it demands, is adherence to the 
fundamental laws of effective speech. It 
continually throws the emphasis upon the 
most elementary and fundamental qualities. 
There must be vitality, the one physical 
quality, the expression of which may vary 
from the restraint of the deep, almost im- 
possible utterance to the outburst of pas- 
sion, but the quality must be in evidence. 
The preacher must be alive, the sermon 
must be a living thing, otherwise the infer- 
ence will be against the truth as well as 
against the preacher. And there must be 
sincerity, the one moral quality; sincerity 
in the choice of a subject and at every step 
in its presentation ; a sincerity so absolute 
that it will insure the denial of all ambitious 
themes, the rejection of all unproven or un- 
real statements, the contempt of all feigned 
emotion ; a sincerity also which will show 
itself in the quickening of the whole moral 
nature and in its ready and complete re- 
sponse to the truth. 



AND HIS ART 105 

The literary qualities of the sermon 
which are in demand are equally clear 
and simple. I would lay the stress upon 
these three, — plainness, force, and beauty. 

What is necessary to insure plainness in 
the sermon ? First, that the thought of the 
sermon be prepared for others. The think- 
ing of the preacher is not to take the place 
of the thinking of the audience, but it is to 
adapt itself to their thought to the degree 
that it may prove a stimulus. There must 
be no strangeness, no remoteness in the 
thought of the pulpit. It must not be alien 
to the current life of men. What are 
called " living subjects " are not necessa- 
rily subjects of the hour, but subjects 
through which life is always flowing in 
steady current. The preacher must learn 
to think toward men, not away from them. 
Why should he not learn to think in their 
terms, just as he always shares the com- 
mon feeling ? There is no more reason 
for the divorce of the pulpit from the in- 
tellectual life of the people than there is 
for its divorce from their emotional life. 
And second, that the sermon have order 
of thought. Order is the chief aid to 



106 THE PREACHER 

understanding. A sermon should be so 
arranged or developed that a hearer can 
never lose his place in it. The preacher 
can count upon a good deal of simple logic 
in the common mind. There may not be 
enough to expose sophistry, but there is 
always enough to follow clear reasoning on 
plain matters. And third, that the sermon 
have simple construction, or movement in 
its parts. A clear thought may be utterly 
lost in a complicated sentence. An in- 
volved period may cost the preacher the 
attention of his audience. Conciseness 
may sometimes be carried to the point of 
obscurity, but conciseness never leads the 
mind astray. Conciseness will not tolerate 
a wandering mind. And fourth, that the 
words employed in the sermon be the 
words of well understood and accepted 
speech. They must be current words. 
Some preachers need to take their ideas 
to the exchangers. They will not always 
receive in return short, homely words. A 
term of Latin derivation may be more 
common than its corresponding Saxon 
form. Familiarity is the chief test. Still, 
the preference goes with the strong, sin- 



AND HIS ART 107 

ewy, terse word rather than with the more 
elegant or even more scrupulously exact 
word. I commend to you the advice which 
Charles Kingsley puts into the mouth of 
the wife of the country esquire of Harthover 
House: " So she made Sir John write to 
the 'Times' to command the Chancellor of 
the Exchequer for the time being to put 
a tax on long words : a light tax on words 
of over three syllables, which are necessary 
evils, like rats, but which like them must 
be kept down judiciously; a heavy tax on 
words of over four syllables, such as heter- 
odoxy, spontaneity, spuriosity, and the like; 
and on words of over five syllables a totally 
prohibitory tax, and a similar prohibitory 
tax on words derived from three or more 
languages at the same time." Plainness 
depends upon such simple requisites as 
these which I have named ; but it rises to 
finer issues, as in the power to simplify, 
the gift of the great teachers ; or in the 
power to make vivid, the gift of those who 
have imagination as well as reason. 

The quality of force is illustrated by 
different types of personality. Its expres- 
sion is determined largely by the tempera- 



io8 THE PREACHER 

ment of the speaker. There are two dis- 
tinct classes of speakers who may be 
rightly termed forcible. In the one class 
power lies in repose, in the other it is in 
strong, intense, it may be, vehement action. 
The one class holds an audience, taking 
command of it by authority. The other 
class projects itself upon an audience, and 
arouses, inspires, or inflames. Not many 
speakers are able to contradict the condi- 
tions of persuasive speech, and produce 
results in others which are not manifest in 
themselves. In this regard Mr. Phillips 
was the exceptional orator of our genera- 
tion, the only man within sound of his own 
words who could remain cool and unim- 
passioned. The distinction which I have 
drawn between force in comparative repose 
and force in personal action is quickly re- 
cognized in the distinction between Ed- 
wards and Chalmers, Webster and Choate, 
Finney and Moody, Conkling and Blaine, 
Spurgeon and Brooks. The versatility of 
Mr. Beecher enabled him to cover both 
types, though his usual type was that of the 
impassioned speaker. I recall with great 
vividness of impression one example of 



AND HIS ART 109 

the range of his eloquence. It was upon 
the occasion of the reception of English 
delegates at the first National Congrega- 
tional Council, held in Boston, near the 
close of the civil war. The state of feel- 
ing between England and the United 
States was then very different from that 
which we are now witnessing. It was no 
easy task for the English delegates to pre- 
sent the greetings of the English churches. 
But the men themselves were not at their 
best. Their words were not well chosen. 
The audience as it listened grew more ex- 
cited and aroused. When Mr. Beecher, 
who had just returned from his triumphant 
tour in England, rose to reply — it was a 
personal, not an official reply — he faced a 
vast body of men in the heat of smothered 
passion. His opening words met the mood 
of the audience. " When I landed in Eng- 
land and first met the people," he said, " it 
seemed to me that God had sent them a 
strong delusion, that they should believe 
a lie. that they all might be damned." 
Then, with inimitable humor and pathos, 
as he described the scenes of his cam- 
paign, he relieved the tension and unbur- 



no THE PREACHER 

dened the heart of his hearers. And then 
having made his audience plastic to his 
touch, he began to mould it to his end. 
His speech broadened, as it advanced, to 
the limits of Christian charity, and rose to 
the height of moral passion befitting the 
subject and the occasion. It was the 
speech of a man who had himself in per- 
fect command as well as his argument, 
and who was therefore able to command 
his audience. He found his audience rest- 
less and angered ; he left it calmed and 
elevated, at peace with itself, if not alto- 
gether at peace with the outer world. 

If one may attempt to describe force by 
its qualities rather than by the personal 
expression of it, I should say that it con- 
sisted in such qualities as these : direct- 
ness, the power of straightforward, on- 
moving speech, speech which brooks no 
interruption but which moves with a stead- 
fast determination to its end, not the mere 
advance of logic, but the advance of the 
whole man ; copiousness, the utterance of 
the full man, which relieves at once the 
fear of mental exhaustion and gives the 
assurance of power in reserve ; nervous- 



AND HIS ART in 

ness of style, the characteristic of which is 
that every thought is alive, that every word 
leaps to its task; and massiveness, the 
weight of well-organized thought, through 
which the speaker is able to make the whole 
of his thought felt through every part. 

I do not dare to venture upon any de- 
finition of beauty, in its application to 
style, within the limit of a paragraph. Cer- 
tainly beauty does not consist in faultless- 
ness nor in any rhetorical devices. It is 
chiefly the product of the imagination, the 
sane imagination. It attends greatness of 
thought, not its mere refinements. It be- 
longs to the positive, the real, the spiritual. 
It is to be found in such simplicity of con- 
ception as marked Mr. Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg Address, in Ruskin's appreciation of 
nature, in Shakespeare's insight and per- 
fection of form. 

These are the qualities of style, upon 
which I would insist, for the pulpit. I can- 
not conceive of a good sermon which does 
not show vitality and sincerity, which is not 
plain and forceful, and in which the trained 
mind at least may not feel at some point 
the presence of beauty. 



ii2 THE PREACHER 

To speak of the tone of the sermon as 
belonging to its artistic side may seem to 
be going beyond the range of art, but I 
think not. Tone is personal, it belongs to 
the man, but it belongs to the preacher as 
such in his relation to given conditions 
and to a well-defined occasion. The pul- 
pit tone has become a term of cant. Let 
us remember that the counterfeit assumes 
the genuine, the caricature, the original. 
The language of the pulpit must be the 
language of certainty; that gives charac- 
ter to its speech. It must be the language 
of sympathy; that gives character to its 
speech. It must be the language of hope- 
fulness, the hopefulness of the gospel ; that 
gives character to its speech. Its speech 
must be characterized by that spiritual 
quality which is no more satisfied with 
mere intellectualism than with sensuous- 
ness. The sermon is the utterance of a 
man who feels in all his nature his de- 
pendence upon God, who stands in awe of 
the divine working in and through him, 
but who rejoices none the less in the joy 
of the divine fellowship. Can anything 
declare in a more perfect simplicity the 



AND HIS ART 113 

secret of the inner life of the preacher 
than the opening words of the Apostle 
John in his first epistle ? " That which 
was from the beginning, that which we 
have heard, that which we have seen with 
our eyes, that which we beheld, and our 
hands handled, concerning the Word of 
life (for the life was manifested, and we 
have seen, and bear witness, and declare 
unto you the life, the eternal life, which 
was with the Father, and was manifested 
unto us) ; that which we have seen and 
heard declare we unto you also, that ye 
also may have fellowship with us: yea, 
and our fellowship is with the Father, and 
with his Son Jesus Christ: and these 
things we write, that our joy may be ful- 
filled." 

Yes, the sermon ought to have a charac- 
ter which befits it. That gives it tone. But 
character in speech can come only out of 
the life of the speaker. If it be true in any 
sense that " the style is the man," it is ten- 
fold more true that the tone is the man. 
And yet I am well aware of the common 
fact that the best men are not always the 
best preachers ; nor is the fact to be over- 



ii 4 THE PREACHER 

looked, that the best preachers, who have 
the fine distinction of character in their 
speech, often preach below their subject 
and below themselves. I will not attempt 
any full explanation of this falling short of 
the pulpit in its best estate. I will, how- 
ever, suggest one reason why, as it seems 
to me, the pulpit in any given case may 
lack the right tone. The lack may be 
due to a certain want of timeliness in the 
immediate preparation for preaching. The 
intellectual and the emotional have not 
been made to act in close and continuous 
companionship. As a result, when the 
time comes to preach, the intellectual ele- 
ment is found to be immature, or the emo- 
tional element has become a spent force. 
To be able to utter a truth in heat, and yet 
when it has taken form and shape, and 
reached its great conclusion — that is 
preaching. But what preacher has not 
felt the fires burning low or dying out 
under the process of elaboration ? The 
truth wrought out at last is not the truth 
which first laid hold upon the heart and 
cried out for utterance. The greater ex- 
periences of the preacher are the reverse 



AND HIS ART 115 

of this, when the truth grows warmer as it 
grows clearer, when it flames as it expands, 
and finally comes forth not only radiant in 
its own light, but touched with emotion. 
Touched with emotion, this is often the 
touch which makes the old new and the 
common fresh. As a quaint old commen- 
tator said, after reading Paul's words to the 
Philippians, — "I have told you often, and 
now I tell you weeping" — " Ah, Paul, that 
makes it a new truth. You have not said 
just that before." 



V 

WHAT THE PREACHER OWES TO THE TRUTH 

In the lectures of this week I shall en- 
deavor to show you how the making or 
unmaking of the preacher is determined 
by the way in which he meets two of his 
imperative responsibilities, his responsibil- 
ity to the truth and his responsibility to 
men. 

The nearest obligation of the preacher, 
an obligation of the nature of a discipline 
or of a task, is that which he owes to his 
art. Day by day, in season and out of sea- 
son, he is at work under the increasing 
force of the homiletic habit. The preacher, 
as we saw at the last lecture, is the artist. 
He must have therefore the conscience of 
the artist. Let not a preacher imagine for 
a moment that he can satisfy his high call- 
ing by any kind of general or specific right- 
eousness, if he neglect his business, his 
art. If God has called him to preach, He 



WHAT PREACHER OWES TO TRUTH 117 

has called him to be a preacher. Preach- 
ing is more than sermonizing, more, that 
is, than the preparation, or the writing, or 
the delivering of a sermon. It involves the 
constant study of all the conditions which 
make the sermon effective. If a sermon is 
ineffective, the preacher has no right to go 
on making sermons just like it. He must 
stop and ask why it is ineffective, and not 
be content until he has found out the rea- 
son. That is the way in which any other 
man works, who has put himself under 
moral obligation to his art. 

But quite beyond any obligation of this 
nature, and in a sense quite above it, are 
those responsibilities which a preacher as- 
sumes toward the truth and toward men. 
And in the treatment of these responsibili- 
ties we may find the clearest evidence of 
the tendencies which are at work for the 
making or the unmaking of the individual 
preacher. 

The subject of to-day is The Responsi- 
bility of the Preacher to the Truth, with 
special reference to present conditions. 

The preacher, in distinction from other 
men who are concerned with the truth, has 



n8 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

a threefold responsibility: First, that the 
truth shall have a hearing. Second, that 
it shall be rightly interpreted to the popu- 
lar mind. Third, that it shall reach men 
through the proper and sufficient motive. 

The first responsibility of the preacher 
is to gain a hearing for the truth. William 
Lloyd Garrison announced his personal 
platform as a reformer in these words : " I 
will not equivocate, I will not compromise, 
I will not retreat a single inch, and I will 
be heard." I believe, gentlemen, that the 
preacher of to-day must have something of 
the personal determination of the reformer. 
The outward situation is not one of hos- 
tility and antagonism. Apparently the 
preacher has the advantage of all other 
men in the setting of his task. Who but 
he has one day in seven given him for an 
opportunity ? Who but he has an institu- 
tion widespread and universally recognized 
standing for his support ? Yet, as we well 
know, neither Sunday nor the church can 
guarantee the preacher a hearing for the 
truth at all commensurate with its signifi- 
cance or with his obligation to it. 

Dr. Fisher has reminded me of the old- 



TO THE TRUTH 119 

time custom in New Haven that whenever 
a preacher of repute arrived unexpectedly 
in the town on a week day, the church 
bell was rung for an evening service, which 
was sure to gather up the greater part of 
the community. Religion as an intellectual 
pursuit was the prevailing interest, a state 
of affairs which no longer exists, so far as 
we know, outside the parish of Drumtochty, 
or possibly the neighboring parish of Til- 
biedrum. In our impatience, we may 
charge the difference to the secularization 
of the age. That may or may not explain 
the change. Certainly it does not offer the 
sufficient excuse ; for we are bound to be- 
lieve that religion has its interests, apart 
from any peculiar type of intellectualism 
which it may develop, and equal to the 
passing concerns of an age. 

In an after - dinner speech, Justice 
Holmes, of the Massachusetts Supreme 
Court, quoted the remark of a friend to the 
effect that, " After all, the only interesting 
thing is religion ; " and then added for him- 
self, " I think it is true, if you take the word 
a little broadly, and include under it the 
passionate curiosity as well as the passion- 



120 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

ate awe which we feel in face of the mystery 
of the universe. This curiosity is the most 
human appetite in man." Now, if to this 
most human appetite we have, which though 
latent in many is constant in all, you add the 
incitement of great disturbing questions, 
questions of authority and destiny and 
human welfare: if you stimulate religion 
on the intellectual side by critical inquiry, 
and on the sympathetic side by contact 
with misery; if you call upon Christianity 
as an historical religion to verify its history, 
and as a religion of humanity to humanize 
the forces which control life ; if, I say, you 
increase and stimulate the common reli- 
gious instinct or appetite by these extraor- 
dinary incitements and demands, you have 
brought about in general the exact state 
of religious thought and life which now 
exists. Without a doubt religion is to-day, 
not only by its own personal rights, but in 
its relation to the age, a "most interesting 
thing." 

This, of course, is a generalization in re- 
gard to the personal appeal of truth. When 
you break up the generalization, and reduce 
the subject to its commonplace conditions, 



TO THE TRUTH 121 

when you ask how men feel about religious 
truth in a given locality, you are met, I 
grant, by comparative indifference where 
you might have expected interest. Church 
going is conceded to be less the custom 
than it was several generations ago ; though 
this fact is not to be stated alone. It is 
also true that the proportion of church 
members to the whole population has in- 
creased, and that the worth of the church 
to the community, when measured by its 
benevolences and general activities, has 
also increased. Church going, too, is some- 
thing which cannot be determined by the 
presence or absence of distracting influ- 
ences. The church of the city is on the 
whole better attended than the church of 
the remote country ; which shows that re- 
ligion can contend better against strong 
competitions than against stagnation or 
lethargy. The traditions of a locality or 
of a sect have much to do with church 
going. A community is usually in whole 
or in part set toward the church or away 
from it. A preacher finds, wherever he 
goes, that he has an inheritance of in- 
terest or of indifference. But when the 



122 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

proper allowance has been made for the in- 
fluences which can be counted upon to 
gain the truth a hearing, it still remains 
that a large added obligation rests upon 
the preacher. To satisfy this obligation he 
must make all legitimate use of his person- 
ality, both within and without the pulpit. 
There are very few uses of one's personal- 
ity, which are genuine and natural, which 
are not legitimate. All affectation and ar- 
tificiality are ruled out, all tricks and man- 
nerisms, all imitations of other preachers, all 
perversion of one's own powers. But every 
really natural gift has a place in the pulpit. 
It is impossible to discuss the question 
of the introduction of humor into the pul- 
pit, apart from the knowledge of the man. 
The humor of one preacher may be as re- 
verent as the solemnity of another. That 
charming quality of quaintness, which gives 
the truth the constant advantage of fresh- 
ness and delicate surprise and unsuspected 
meaning, how much more effective it is 
than any rhetorical elaboration or any 
straining after originality. And the use 
of dramatic power, if the power is abso- 
lutely genuine and irresistible, how surely 



TO THE TRUTH 123 

it lays hold upon us all without respect to 
persons. When Father Taylor drew to his 
sailor chapel, where he kept the body of 
the house reserved for his sailors, Dr. 
Channing and Daniel Webster, and later 
John A. Andrew and his friends, it was 
" the touch of nature which makes the 
whole world kin." 

I know of no limit which we can put 
upon the freedom of a greatly gifted man, 
whom God has set in the pulpit. Great 
gifts, however, have a various result. They 
may repel as well as invite. It is for this 
reason that the most popular preachers 
are seldom universally popular. They all 
have their limitations. Test the fact by 
the attempt to exchange the audiences 
which different men may have gathered, 
and I think that you would be surprised 
at the result. Who supposes that Canon 
Liddon could have retained Mr. Spur- 
geon's audience had it been transferred to 
St. Paul's, or that Mr. Spurgeon could 
have retained Canon Liddon's audience 
had it been transferred to the Tabernacle ? 
Or apply the same test to men of such 
wide humanity in common as Phillips 



i2 4 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

Brooks and Dwight Moody. When Mr. 
Moody was in Boston some years ago, Mr. 
Brooks took his service at one session. 
After reading his sermon, which was re- 
ported in the papers, I wondered how long 
the same audience would have been held 
under that type of preaching. An audi- 
ence there would have been, but not, I be- 
lieve, for any long time the same. 

As the element of genuine personality 
in the pulpit is increased it will insure an 
enlarged hearing for the truth, but how it 
will act in a given case cannot be predi- 
cated in advance. We must deal in total 
results. The law is, the greater the per- 
sonality of the preacher, the larger the use 
of his personality, the wider and deeper 
the response of men to the truth. And the 
same law applies, though in less degree, to 
the use of personality outside the pulpit. 
The pastoral gift serves the truth. The 
preacher who can establish right relations 
with men at large in any community, im- 
pressing them with his genuineness, ear- 
nestness, and disinterested zeal in their be- 
half, has won a clientage for the truth 
which he holds. I will not touch upon 



TO THE TRUTH 125 

what I may wish to say later about the 
knowledge of human nature in the con- 
crete as the pastorate opens it to the 
preacher, but I cannot refrain from saying 
at this point that pastoral service is the 
proper apprenticeship to the pulpit. At 
some time the preacher ought to know 
human life in its details. 

The preacher is not limited in the use 
of his personality in gaining a hearing for 
the truth; he has the liberty of wise in- 
vention. There is an old term, now out 
of use but very significant, the means of 
grace ; means of grace are usually means 
of spiritual impression. It is to be re- 
membered that the various denomina- 
tions are founded upon the use of means. 
The Christian communions are not so 
clearly or widely separated from one an- 
other by doctrine or by polity as by method. 
As the emphasis is laid upon authority, as 
with the Romanist, or upon creed, as with 
the Presbyterian, or upon worship, as with 
the Episcopalian, or upon experience, as 
with the Methodist, you have in the main 
the distinguishing characteristic. Any- 
thing which is so fundamental as method 



126 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

must be capable of very great and ex- 
tended use. Why should not the preacher 
use it according to his ability and accord- 
ing to his sense of the fitness of things? 
A great deal is sometimes gained by the 
appeal to the unused side of the spiritual 
nature. I noticed some years ago in a 
series of meetings held by Mr. Moody, in 
New York, that many of the most earnest 
attendants and supporters were Episcopa- 
lians and Quakers. The Puritan churches 
have made their uninterrupted appeal for 
many generations to the reason and con- 
science. Why should they not also make 
the appeal more distinctly and impressively 
to the instinct of reverence and to the 
craving for worship ? Why should they 
not also carry the appeal straight to the 
heart ? And if there be other methods 
which recognize and utilize any of the 
primary instincts of human nature, let 
them be brought into service. One such 
is the instinct for association, which under- 
lies the various organizations, societies, 
and clubs, which make an opportunity for 
the truth. If men who would not other- 
wise support or even attend a service of 



TO THE TRUTH 127 

the church will become actively interested 
in the church by forming a club for the 
maintenance of a special service, why 
should not the principle be recognized and 
the aid accepted ? 

I will go a step further and plead for 
the recognition of peculiar means, which 
must be limited in their use to those whose 
chief reliance is upon the employment of 
them. My illustration shall be the use of 
authority as exemplified by the methods 
of the Salvation Army. The outfit of uni- 
form, drums, and the like is simply an out- 
fit. The underlying principle is authority. 
The man who is reached by the army is 
asked to surrender himself absolutely to 
its discipline. It is assumed, in the ma- 
jority of cases, that his will has been 
weakened. The army offers him its will, 
organized and disciplined, as a substitute 
for his own, till he is strong enough to act 
for himself, and in turn to contribute to 
the common stock. His first and constant 
act is obedience. He is put under orders, 
tasks are assigned to him, days of special 
denial are appointed; he is made to live 
under the common eye; the surrender is in 



128 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

every way complete, till he is transformed 
from a mere dependent upon others to a 
helper and strengthener of others. This 
is the philosophy of the means of grace 
employed by the Salvation Army, an ex- 
ample of the use of authority unequaled 
outside the Romish Church. 

Certainly the question will arise how far 
the incidents attending the use of any 
great principle are to be approved or al- 
lowed. Religion can bear a good deal, but 
it stops short of the grotesque. As Dr. 
Howard Crosby once said, " If the gospel 
were preached by an orang-outang, it 
would not be the gospel." There must 
be some fitness between means and end. 
But I think that we have less to fear from 
unfit methods than from the lack of an 
aggressive invention. I believe that the 
church suffers more from the under-use 
than from the over-use of means. 

I can refer only to the use by the 
preacher of special and applied truths to 
get a hearing for the essential truth. Let 
me say that I believe so fully in the unity 
of truth that I think we can afford to 
meet men at all points of their personal 



TO THE TRUTH 129 

interest, provided their interests are not 
hobbies. Concerning the man with a 
hobby nothing is to be said but " to avoid 
him, pass not by him, turn from him and 
flee away." But there are outlying ques- 
tions which are fairly upon the territory 
held by the gospel. The concerns of 
Christianity are wide and sensitive, and 
of an infinite variety. The preacher, if 
he has the spiritual ability, can fitly go 
out to men who are living in the remote 
regions of the Christian faith or the Chris- 
tian interest, and try to bring them back 
with him to the heart of Christ. I am 
aware of the dangers of this method. The 
untrained preacher will fail utterly as a 
specialist. And the trained preacher 
may go too far afield in the search after 
the exceptional man. Still, there is an 
opportunity within the range of so-called 
special questions for introducing men's 
thoughts to the more personal claims of 
Christianity. 

The second responsibility of the 
preacher to the truth is that of rightly in- 
terpreting it to the popular mind. The 
interpretation of religious truth involves 



i 3 o WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

the understanding of the mind to be 
reached as well as of the truth to be de- 
clared. A preacher may have a clear and 
right understanding of religious truth, but 
he will still fail in the interpretation of it 
if he does not know and estimate the state 
of mind before him. We can see that no 
amount of biblical or theological or homi- 
letic training could enable one to interpret 
Christianity to the Oriental thought. The 
missionary must not only learn the lan- 
guage of an Oriental people, he must learn 
the thought of the people, before he can 
reach them to any extent. This is an ex- 
treme illustration. But we are apt, I think, 
to overestimate the accessibility of reli- 
gious truth to the average mind of Chris- 
tendom. Let us analyze the situation. 

A great many people are still alien to 
Christian thinking who are not alien to the 
Christian spirit. Interpretation means in 
such cases the introduction of the terms 
of Christianity. Ask the average young 
person who is about to join the church, 
" What do you think it is to be a Chris- 
tian ? " or " What does it mean to you to 
be a Christian ? " and the chances are that 






TO THE TRUTH 131 

you will receive from one out of five an 
answer in general moral or religious terms. 
To be a Christian means to try to do right, 
or to attend church, or to be kind and 
helpful, — very good answers, but not an- 
swers lying at the heart of Christianity. 
Personal Christianity remains to be inter- 
preted to such an one. The relation of 
the soul to Christ is to be brought out 
with a simplicity corresponding to the 
outward duty which may already exist. 
A great deal of the work of the pulpit, 
in every community, consists in making 
connection between Christianity and the 
general moral sense of people, vitalizing 
their existing life, purifying it, opening it 
out into the Christian opportunity, and 
giving it the motive and power which 
come only from the indwelling Christ. 

And then there is the relation of the 
pulpit to a considerable amount of preju- 
diced mind, in the church and out of it. I 
suppose that there is no type of mind so 
unmanageable, so impervious to the ad- 
vance of religious truth, as the traditional- 
ized mind« Sometimes it finds its way into 
the pulpit. I once heard a minister say at 



i 3 2 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

his examination, as his final answer to all 
questions bearing upon modern inquiry, 
" My mother's theology is good enough for 
me." Doubtless his mother's religion was 
good enough for him or for anybody else ; 
but when one plants himself upon his mo- 
ther's theological standing, he announces 
that he has no use for further theological 
inquiry. 

There is no little amount of mind of 
this character in and out of the church, 
— quite as much without as within, and, 
if anything, more difficult to reach. What 
can the preacher do with it? It is of no 
use to attack a prejudiced mind. You can- 
not always tell a man what you think of 
his opinions if you want to reach the man. 
Suppose one tells you that he believes in 
the inerrancy of Scripture as based on the 
correctness of the original autographs. I 
do not know of anything to do except to 
change the subject. You can hardly ex- 
press yourself about that opinion and have 
a chance for further effort after the man. 
I do not know of the way of arguing with 
a literalist of any sort, with a view of con- 
vincement. The only approach to such a 



TO THE TRUTH 133 

mind is through interpretation. You have 
the opportunity, Sunday after Sunday, of 
so opening the Scriptures in their spirit 
that the final result may be a deliverance 
from the bondage of the letter. Certainly 
argument is useless and controversy is 
wicked; there is no power outside the 
right use of interpretation. The spiritual 
must always have time in which to do its 
work. Familiarity with the broader truth 
will in time displace the narrower view. 

And then there is the over-familiarized 
mind, both in the church and without, the 
mind which knows it all, which is impa- 
tient of instruction and resentful of any 
intimation of the need of further know- 
ledge. This is on the whole the most 
common type and the most difficult to 
reach. It is mind which all unconsciously 
to itself has fallen into the commonplace. 
And yet you cannot say just that, you 
cannot accuse it of ignorance and dullness. 
Nothing again remains but the art of in- 
terpretation. That is enough. There lies 
the power to stimulate, to quicken, to 
awaken. Sometimes the confession will 
follow preaching of this order, the " whereas 



i 3 4 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

I was blind, now I see ; " but more fre- 
quently the preacher must be content with 
the gradual opening of the mental vision, 
and the gradual awakening of the spiritual 
nature. 

These all represent types or states of 
mind to be changed, — the mind alien to 
Christian thought, the prejudiced mind, 
and the mind which has been over-familiar- 
ized with religious truth. 

But the great body of mind which is 
before the preacher does not need to be 
changed. It is serious, intelligent, well- 
disposed, and open. What are the preach- 
er's obligations to this prevailing class of 
mind ? One obligation is of the time, one 
is permanent. The immediate obligation 
is to present all necessary changes in reli- 
gious thought without prejudice to the 
religious life. It cannot be denied that 
we all love to believe in the unchange- 
ableness of religion. So much is un- 
changeable in principle that we like to 
carry over this quality into things which 
are incidental. The traditionalist, the lit- 
eralist, the ecclesiastic, have the advantage 
in being able to relate everything, which 



sr r 



TO THE TRUTH 135 

they believe to be or wish to make per- 
manent, to something which is permanent. 
But when, as in our time, it seems neces- 
sary, to all who believe in progress, to 
effect changes in the outward and inci- 
dental to save the really permanent, the 
problem is, how to bring about these 
changes with the least disturbance to the 
life and work of the church. The most 
difficult manoeuvre in war is change of 
front in battle. The manoeuvre may be 
well executed ; but if the battle be lost, 
the greater has failed before the less. 
Whatever theological changes are yet to 
be made in our time ought to be made 
without loss to the fight. This particular 
obligation rests almost entirely with the 
pulpit. The preacher is in command 
where truth is in conflict with all error 
which is of the nature of unrighteous- 
ness. He cannot forget that the main 
object is the victory. Neither can he 
overlook his obligation to the truth, as 
it becomes to his mind more clearly the 
truth. He will not be disloyal to his 
knowledge any more than to his convic- 
tions, but he will so interpret the truth as 



136 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

he sees it that the change will be construc- 
tive and not destructive. He will wait till 
he gets possession of the new truth posi- 
tively. He will wait till he knows where 
to place the emphasis. He will wait till 
he knows how to make the right adjust- 
ment. In a word, he will interpret the 
truth so that it will fit the new duties 
which have really been in waiting for it. 
For you may be assured, gentlemen, that 
if God has brought any new truth to this 
age, it is to accomplish new tasks. Reve- 
lation and Providence are always so timed 
that truth never stands idle in the market- 
place. 

But the personal obligation of the 
preacher is always that of the larger and 
nobler interpretation of the truth. I know 
of no greater joy to the preacher than to 
stand with his truth, the truth with which 
he is aglow, before the hospitable mind. 
And, as compared with all' other types and 
conditions, this is by far the largest. A 
preacher has nothing to fear, but every- 
thing to expect, who enters his pulpit with 
the deeper and fuller interpretation of 
familiar truth. The opening of Scripture 



TO THE TRUTH 137 

as the result of study and insight, and I 
may add of personal experience, is grateful 
to an audience. The reward to the preacher 
is the growth of his people in and through 
the truth. He leaves them larger than 
when he found them. The congregation 
will probably have increased in numbers ; 
it will certainly be larger by every other 
measurement. It will have the great di- 
mensions, length, breadth, height, and 
depth. 

I think that I have reserved enough 
time in this lecture to say what is really 
the essential thing, though being the essen- 
tial thing it may take the less time to say 
it. The third and most serious obligation 
of the preacher to the truth is, to see that 
it reaches men at his hands through the 
sufficient and proper motive. Motive, in 
that lies the power of religious truth. In- 
directly, incidentally, all truth may have 
motive. But in religious truth the motive 
gives it reality. You could not take the 
motive out of the atonement and leave it 
a religious truth. I count by far the most 
serious and difficult task of the preacher 
to give the sufficient motive to the truth 



138 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

he utters. Indeed, if he can really do that, 
he has gained a hearing for it, and given it 
its highest interpretation. 

I sometimes question whether we have 
the right to preach until we have become 
so imbued with the motive of Scripture 
that we have the mind of the prophet 
under the utterance of his message from 
God. It was not so much the message 
which possessed him as it was the concep- 
tion of the heart of God which the message 
disclosed : " Who is a God like unto thee, 
that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the 
transgression of the remnant of his herit- 
age ? He retaineth not his anger forever, 
for that he delighteth in mercy. He will 
turn again, he will have compassion on us ; 
he will subdue our iniquities : and thou wilt 
cast all their sins into the depth of the 
sea." We preach God in his own blessed 
person, not his attributes, or his words, or 
his doings, chiefly. Our supreme message 
is God himself. As Paul says, over and 
over again, " We preach Christ." I think 
that it was Paul's apprehension of Christ 
which has given him such a place of influ- 
ence in Christianity. More of the motive 



TO THE TRUTH 139 

of Christianity is in his writings than we 
can find elsewhere. He never gets away, 
not in the furthest reaches of his logic, 
from the love of Christ. In this Paul is 
true to his date in the divine revelation. 
He comes into the divine thought as it 
becomes more urgent in the endeavor to 
save. We mistake if we think that the 
Bible advances from the sacrificial to the 
ethical. The advance, if the comparison 
is to be made at all under the idea of 
progress, is from the ethical to the sacri- 
ficial. That is, the motive of God comes 
out with a deeper promise and with a 
more irresistible power in the New Testa- 
ment than in the Old. God comes near 
to man, surrenders more, not of righteous- 
ness, but of himself, to reach man, suffers 
more for man. The sermon on the mount 
holds all the ethics of the commandments ; 
but from the sermon on the mount to the 
passion and death of Jesus, what an ad- 
vance there is in the motive power of the 
gospel ! Allow me to quote from what I 
have elsewhere written on this point : — 

" The method of Jesus was sacrificial, — 
ethical certainly, but not to the exclusion 



140 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

or subordination of the sacrificial. And the 
proof of this lies in his treatment of the 
principle and idea of sacrifice. When we 
begin to study the method of Jesus we are 
startled to find that he reversed the whole 
course and current of sacrifice. The great 
volume of sacrifice had been pouring 
through innumerable channels from the 
heart of man into the heart of God. 
Christ met and overwhelmed the sacrifice 
of man with the sacrifice of God. It was 
the inflowing tide of the ocean staying and 
returning the waters from river and creek 
which were seeking its bosom. The act of 
Jesus was an act of sublime daring. We 
instinctively ask, Who is it who dares to 
make this reversal ? Who is it that bids 
men cease their propitiatory rites ? Who 
is it that puts out the fires on sacrificial 
altars and stanches the blood of sacrificial 
victims ? It is He who carries out the 
change in his own person and offers him- 
self the Lamb of God, which taketh away 
the sin of the world." 

The failure of merely ethical religions is 
that they lack motive. We can see that 
fact when it is set forth on a large scale. 



TO THE TRUTH 141 

It is equally a fact when the ethical is the 
sole power in a man's preaching. He has 
not come into the permanent power of the 
Bible. He has not caught the secret of 
Christianity. He is not giving the truth 
its full chance with men through the proper 
and sufficient use of motive. 

I must not fail to remind you, or to in- 
sist upon the fact, that there is need of 
a constant education on the part of both 
preacher and people in the use of motive. 
A motive may meet a man where it finds 
him, and be sufficient to work a great 
change in his life. It does not follow that 
it is the sufficient motive for his after 
years. It is difficult to arrange motives 
in order. We should place fear below 
love ; but the soul which has been won by 
love may advance into the fear of sin, and 
in a very true sense into the fear of God. 
It is, however, certain that a change of life, 
which takes place through a fear of conse- 
quences, has not arrived at the dignity or 
honor or security which ought to come in 
through the advance in motive. The dis- 
tinctively Christian motive is gratitude. 
" The life which I now live I live by faith 



142 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

of the Son of God, who loved me, and 
gave himself up for me." Gratitude is 
altogether unselfish, and it knows no limits 
in the measure of its obligations. There 
is nothing which a profoundly grateful 
Christian will not do. His gratitude 
carries with it the whole argument for 
consistency. What should not one be 
ready to give up, or to seek to accom- 
plish, who has been reclaimed by Christ, 
and is thoroughly conscious of the fact ? 

Prudential motives are not excluded from 
the gospel. A man has the same right to 
escape from sin, and for the same reason, 
that he would escape from any evil or in- 
jury. Motives of self-respect are not ex- 
cluded from the gospel. The gospel makes 
its appeal to men on the ground that they 
are worth too much to themselves, and to 
other men, and to God, to waste themselves 
in sinning. Neither are motives which 
centre in happiness. There is a joy in- 
separable from right doing. All these 
motives are in place, and may be timely. 
But the principle in the use of motives for 
one's self, or for others, should be that of 
advance. Life consists not only in doing 



TO THE TRUTH 143 

better things, or doing the same right 
things in a better way, but also in doing 
them for a better reason. It is this alone 
which explains the change in some people 
when they become Christians. They keep 
on doing the very same things. They do 
not change their business. They do not 
change, of necessity, their methods. They 
have changed their motives, and in the 
light of that change all life has been 
purified, refined, and ennobled. It is this 
which explains the growth in so many 
Christians. They are acting from higher 
and higher reasons. The lower reasons 
have been supplanted. Their lives are 
growing in unity. They are reaching the 
Christian standard. I cannot make too 
much of the power of motive rightly ap- 
plied, first to change men, and then to 
purify and increase their lives. And a 
great deal of the quality of this power 
depends upon the quality of the motive in 
the thought of the preacher. One preacher 
will secure large tangible results by the 
use of lower motives ; another preacher 
will secure equally large and tangible re- 
sults by the use of the higher motives. 



144 WHAT PREACHER OWES TO TRUTH 

Does any one question where the advan- 
tage lies ? 

These, then, are the responsibilities, as 
I conceive, of the preacher to the truth. 
He is commissioned to get a hearing for 
the truth. He has no right to be satisfied 
with a meagre response. God has given 
him the truth, the freedom of his personal- 
ity, and means to be used according to his 
own invention. He is to see that the truth 
is rightly interpreted, that no type of mind 
is excluded by reason of its limitations, and 
that every hospitable mind is filled to the 
full. And he is allowed to share in the very 
motive of God himself in the utterance of 
truth. A part of his education is made to 
consist in the appreciation and use of the 
highest motives. And the reward of his 
ceaseless persuasion of men is to be found 
in the quality of the new life which he gives 
back to God as the result of his ministry. 



VI 

WHAT THE PREACHER OWES TO MEN 

If the responsibility of the preacher to 
the truth is sacred, no less sacred is his re- 
sponsibility to men. I do not know which 
obligation is the more difficult to satisfy. 
Probably it varies with the preacher himself. 
With one man, the ardor for truth sur- 
passes the passion for men. With another, 
the love of men exceeds in urgency, at 
least, the love of truth. I should say, how- 
ever, that the distinguishing characteristic 
of the preacher was his feeling toward 
men. Others may share to the full his 
feeling toward the truth, scholars, inquir- 
ers, believers, but few are able to come into 
like sensitive relation to the human soul. 

What does the preacher owe to men ? 
How shall we take the measure of his 
obligation ? 

Let me begin with what is fundamental. 
If I cannot ground the obligation of the 



146 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

preacher to men in something deeper and 
firmer than sentiment, my words can have 
little meaning. 

The first thing, then, which the preacher 
owes to men is the clear understanding 
and unconditional acceptance of Christ's 
view of humanity. Christ's estimate of 
men, his way of looking at men, his whole 
conception of humanity, must become a 
part of the preacher's thinking, the very 
habit of his mind. What was Christ's esti- 
mate of humanity ? What was the con- 
tribution which Christ made to man's 
thought of himself, to the thought which 
the race might have of itself? Jesus 
Christ gave to the human race that new 
conception of itself which, as fast as it has 
been apprehended, man by man, has been 
changing the order of the world. It was 
a religious conception, but it had other 
than religious uses. It was good for all 
the possible needs of humanity. It was 
the simple but then rare conception, every 
man a child of God. That truth gave 
every man a standing in the world. It 
was fundamental. It was communicable. 
It was part of the glad tidings. And 






TO MEN 147 

as it went abroad under the sanction of 
religion, it was commissioned to do any 
work for man to which he was entitled as 
a child of God. The question is often 
asked, Why did not Christ say something 
directly about slavery, about political ty- 
ranny, about any of the specific wrongs of 
his age ? The sufficient answer is that he 
said the one word which could avail for his 
own age, and which could not be super- 
seded in time. 

This word of Christ is now almost lost 
in the commonplace, but at its time it 
brought in the one value which had always 
been wanting. Man had never had any 
value to himself as man. Man had had 
standing in the world, but not as man. 
History had been the record of heroes 
only, not even of peoples. Ordinary men 
were of no account. When, therefore, 
Christ put this new valuation upon man, 
partly through what he was in himself, 
partly through what he did and suffered, 
and partly through the idea which he sent 
abroad into all the world, it was inevitable 
that history must be written in a new 
language. 



148 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

I would that I could take this truth of 
Jesus out of the commonplace of our reli- 
gious thinking and make it real to you in 
its original meaning. Let me recall a para- 
graph from a book which you have been 
reading of late, which brings out the ap- 
parent impossibility of the new idea as it 
came into the world. I quote from the 
letter of the Roman philosopher and man 
of the world, Petronius, to his young friend 
Vinicius, who had urged upon him the 
Christian faith, to which he had become 
a convert : — 

" No, Vinicius, thy religion is not for 
me. Am I to love the Bithynians who 
carry my litter, the Egyptians who heat 
my bath ? I swear by the white knees of 
the Graces that if I wished to love them I 
could not. In Rome there are a hundred 
thousand persons at least who have either 
crooked shoulders or big knees, or thin 
thighs, or staring eyes, or heads that are 
too large. Dost thou command me to 
love them, too ? Where am I to find the 
love, since it is not in my heart ? And if 
thy God desires me to love such persons, 
why in his all might did he not give them 



TO MEN 149 

the form of Niobe's children, for example, 
which thou hast seen on the Palatine ? 
Who loves beauty is for that very reason 
unable to love deformity." 

Whatever exaggerations the book from 
which I have quoted may hold, this pro- 
test is no exaggeration of the pagan feeling 
toward man as man. The virtues which 
Christianity enjoined — love the forgive- 
ness of enemies, and the like — seemed 
impossible virtues. And all for the reason 
that man as man had no standing in the 
world. Even the greatest and best men 
had taken little pride in their humanity. 
Sometimes it seems as if it were still so. 
It is so much more to be a philosopher, an 
orator, a ruler, a maker of money, or man- 
ager of affairs, any one of these things, 
than to be simply great in one's humanity ! 
You can see, then, the difficulty which 
Christ must have had in introducing this 
principle, and of making it actually an ac- 
cepted truth, first to make the best men 
believe it of themselves and act upon it, 
changing their ideals and also their ambi- 
tions and desires, and then to make them 
believe it of others, this Pharisee of this 



150 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

publican, this Greek of this barbarian, this 
master of this slave ; and then to make 
these other men believe it of themselves, 
these men who could not idealize them- 
selves, who had no sense of the meaning 
and worth of the human, to make them 
believe that they, too, were sons of God, 
and had a standing in God's world. 

And the difficulty is still immense. It 
is for this reason that I am saying so much 
about it. It is so hard to get at the idea 
of Christ in its perfect simplicity, and hold 
it in its right proportions. We are apt to 
pass to one extreme or the other in our 
thought of men. The pagan's estimate 
was based on his natural or trained likes 
and dislikes. He loved the beautiful, he 
honored the heroic. For the opposites he 
had only contempt or hate. The Chris- 
tian is apt to go to the other extreme, to 
estimate his Christianity altogether by its 
power to overcome his dislikes or hates. 
For the exercise of love he relies upon the 
incitement of pity. He waits the appeal 
which comes to him from want or misery 
or sin. We have come to count it a virtue 
to love men according to the incidents 



TO MEN 151 

in their character or conditions. It was 
this principle which led Cardinal Manning 
to pass his generous encomium upon the 
Salvation Army as the only considerable 
body of Christians who had ever shown a 
passion for sinners just because they were 
sinners. Now Christ's position is very 
much broader and more fundamental than 
either of these. The estimate which he 
enjoins is not simply respect for high at- 
tainment, nor pity for low condition. It 
unites the recognition and acknowledg- 
ment and support of the fact, let it go 
where it will, — every man a child of God. 

What ! must I love the man who does 
not need me, who has no outward wants 
which are unsatisfied, this rich man, per- 
chance, who is entirely independent of me, 
and with whom I have no tastes in com- 
mon ? Certainly ; otherwise why am I any 
broader than the Roman who could not 
love the Bithynians who carried his litter, 
or the Egyptians who heated his bath ? 

Do you not see the difficulty of accept- 
ing Christ's estimate, the difficulty of even 
understanding it ? And yet there it is, the 
very first thing which meets us in Chris- 



152 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

tianity, just as plain as the view which he 
gave us of God. I cannot lay too much 
stress upon this obligation to think of and 
look upon every man as a child of God. 
I speak of it as expressed in the estimate 
or conception we have of men, rather than 
in a doctrine about men. We are apt to 
retire our doctrines. They represent the 
truth we have on deposit. They fulfill a 
very needful and substantial office in this 
respect. But we need also thoughts, views, 
estimates, which are never apart from us, 
which we always take with us on the street, 
and into the house, the office, and the shop. 
We must allow a large liberty in the 
application of so great and difficult a prin- 
ciple. It is not possible for one man to 
think of his fellowman precisely as an- 
other man may think of him. Tempera- 
ments vary. We are allowed to reach the 
same ends by different methods. One of 
the most human preachers of our time, a 
man whose name was almost a synonym 
for the human, once said to a friend, " I 
love man and hate men." That was not 
so bad a saying as it appears to be on its 
face. His love worked from the ideal into 



TO MEN 153 

the real, from man down into men, over- 
coming on its way his natural dislikes. 
This is the opposite in method of the love 
which shows itself first in interest in cases. 
Objects of pity or commiseration come be- 
fore one. One begins to be interested in 
them. Interest spreads from the individ- 
ual to the class. Finally it comes out into 
a great generalization. 

I recall a fine example of the latter and 
more common method in the person of a 
well-known philanthropist of New York, 
who for more than half a century followed 
the lead of individual want and suffering 
into the class which it might represent. 
The personal relief of the poor brought to 
light the child of poverty, the child of pov- 
erty led the way to his crippled brother, 
the diseased child pointed to the suffer- 
ing mother. When I knew my honored 
friend, he had passed his threescore and 
ten years. An incident associated with his 
greatest personal bereavement revealed to 
me the whole spirit of his life. As I called 
upon him in his sorrow, he took me after a 
little into the presence of his dead, and 
there talked as only the voice of love and 



154 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

age could speak. Suddenly he stopped, 
put his hand in his pocket and took out a 
check. " There," he said, " is a check for 
twenty-five thousand from Mrs. Stewart 
for my woman's hospital." Then, resum- 
ing the conversation as if there had been 
no interruption, there really had been none, 
he covered the face of his dead, and with- 
drew to take up again in its time his now 
solitary but still joyous course. 

The preacher's obligation to men, upon 
which I have thus far insisted, shows itself 
chiefly in the breadth of its application. 
Let me now urge the necessity for a cer- 
tain intensity in the exercise of it. The 
obligation cannot be satisfied with the love 
for men which does not have in it the ele- 
ment of devotion or passion. In this re- 
gard it simply demands what is the real 
characteristic of love in any circumstance. 
You have the suggestion of my meaning 
in a line from one of the recent poems of 
Stephen Phillips. It is the reply of the 
earth maiden as she rejects the suit of 
Apollo on the ground that his love for her 
would surely wane, and this would be the 
sign of it : — 



TO MEN 155 

" Thou wouldst grow kind, 
Most bitter to a woman who was loved." 

" Kindness " is a good word, a word of 
gentle quality, but the very thoughtfulness 
which it implies, the premeditation which 
it assumes, may defeat the large end of 
love. Kindness is not that frresistible, 
conquering power that love is. It may 
awaken gratitude and create a permanent 
sense of obligation, but it does not really 
overcome and capture the soul. 

The preacher will certainly come short 
of fulfilling his obligation to men if his 
love for them does not rise to the strength 
of a spiritual passion for them. It must be 
utterly devoid of sentimentalism. That is 
too weak a thing to speak about. It must 
be a strong, manly passion, but it must 
have the ardor of the soul in it. And 
this alike in public and private, when the 
preacher is dealing with men under condi- 
tions which invite it. Passion is something 
which has its times and seasons. It is not 
for all times, nor for all subjects in the 
pulpit, nor for all the circumstances which 
invite the preacher's attention. There 
must be a proportion in the expression of 



156 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

love. Usually the man who has it in any 
real depth of feeling will give the fit ex- 
pression to it. It will come forth sponta- 
neously, and according to the real demand 
for it. There is nothing so impressive as 
the irrepressible outburst of feeling on the 
part of a man whose feelings are usually 
under strong restraint. 

The obligation of the preacher to men, 
let me say further, has one of its most 
timely expressions in sympathy. That is 
the exact quality which is called for in 
our time more than any other. It meets 
the general situation as nothing else can. 
It gives the preacher access where other- 
wise access will certainly be denied him. 
The preacher, as we have seen, if he has 
caught the secret of his Master, has learned 
to pay his respects to humanity in whom- 
soever it may be represented, and at any 
cost. Respect is the prince of influence. 
It is the respecting element in Christianity, 
more than the pitying element, which is 
the peculiar sign of its power. Sympathy 
measures the respect we feel for those who 
are in circumstances and conditions below 
us. It is a very different quality from pity, 



TO MEN 157 

or from charity in any of its common 
forms. It is the recognition of the human 
element which survives poverty and even 
degradation ; it is the acknowledgment of 
the underlying equality between man and 
man beneath all varying conditions; it is 
the appreciation of the endeavor and am- 
bition to rise to higher levels ; it is above 
all the willingness to make room for men 
as they rise, and to welcome them to 
the places which they have earned. Pity 
ceases when the object of commiseration 
has been lifted a little out of the low 
estate. Charity, which gives alms, follows 
a little way above in the ascending scale. 
Sympathy attends the man all the way 
up till he has reached the level of his 
manhood. 

Now it is perfectly evident that the moral 
solvent of the present social situation is not 
pity, it is not charity in any of its common 
manifestations, it is sympathy. Analyze 
the situation, study society where the strug- 
gle is going on, and you will discover two 
clearly defined movements, the upward and 
the downward; one class ascending, the 
other descending the social scale, and yet 



158 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

not far apart. On the one hand the worn- 
out, the demoralized, the degraded, falling 
steadily to the bottom ; on the other hand 
a certain vital element gradually emerging 
from the common mass, freeing itself from 
base surroundings, organizing for self-pro- 
tection and self-advancement, and finally 
able to stand with comparative security and 
lend a helping hand to those in the crude 
mass about it. Compare now the attitude 
of the church toward the upward and the 
downward movements, and you see at once 
that it shows far more charity for the fall- 
ing, than sympathy with the rising class. 
On occasion like that of the strike of the 
East London dockers, or the coal strike 
in England for the living wage, sympathy 
is shown as well as charity. But, as a rule, 
sympathy in distinction from charity is ab- 
sent ; and it is the absence of this precious 
quality which makes the breach between 
what is known collectively as labor and the 
church. The average workingman gives 
his money, his time, and his loyalty to his 
association or brotherhood, and looks on 
with indifference or amusement while the 
religious world discusses the reasons why 



TO MEN 159 

men like himself do not fill the churches. 
If I were discussing the attitudes of labor 
organizations I might have something to 
say of their spirit, but the divine function of 
the church is sympathy, the highest possi- 
ble expression of its enthusiasm for human- 
ity. And judging the church of to-day by 
this test I cannot claim for it that it satis- 
fies in any reasonable degree the require- 
ment of its Founder. The average man 
within the church does not understand the 
average man without, who may be estranged 
from the church, nor does he take pains 
to understand him. He may know the 
man on his own social level without, but 
not the man estranged, and who has his 
complaint. 

The preacher interprets the situation 
largely through his sympathy. And in the 
proper expression of it he does the most 
which in him lies to make Christianity real 
to men who have misunderstood its atti- 
tude. And in the use of sympathy the 
preacher puts Christianity in right relation 
to the social and political order of which 
we are a part. The general social and po- 
litical order bears the name of democracy. 



160 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

Democracy means, if it means anything in 
a Christian way, the sympathy of one man 
with another. The kind of equality which 
it stands for covers every lower form or 
expression of Christianity. 

One of the most delicate obligations 
which the preacher comes under to men is 
not only to believe in them himself, but 
also to restore the faith which they may 
have lost in themselves. A preacher learns 
with time not to take men at their own es- 
timates, and especially not to take too seri- 
ously the deprecatory words of some men 
about themselves. A great many men are 
talking skepticism who are not skeptical. 
Let the preacher waste no words on such. 
But there are those with whom loss of 
faith in themselves is real, and to outward 
appearance justifiable. They have fallen 
in self-respect, and their own opinion has 
been accepted and confirmed by their fel- 
lows. The saddest word in literature is 
the word attributed to Lord Byron : " Men 
took me to be what I said I was, and I 
came to be what they thought I was." So- 
ciety may have made haste to accept a fool- 
ish name or reputation which a man may 



TO MEN 161 

have given himself, and obliged him there- 
fore to justify it. A preacher has no right 
to take any man's word about himself or 
the word of society about him as final. 
Jesus Christ alone speaks the final word. 
Until that has been spoken, let the preacher 
believe and act in his name. 

The majority of cases may be against 
one's faith in men. Grant that. There is 
still the minority. Who knows in advance 
how the man, who is most faithless in him- 
self, and most hopeless to others, is to be 
classified ? This may be optimism. It is 
also Christianity. 

The wide obligation, however, of the 
preacher to the individual man, whoever 
he may be, who comes under his influence, 
is that of interest in the welfare of his soul. 
As there can be no motive so great, so 
there can be no equal and corresponding 
obligation like that which comes out of the 
realized value of the human soul. It is 
really the unknown factor in human na- 
ture, which is so much more than the 
known. It is the great item in the mys- 
tery of life. What makes the mystery to 
us of the future state ? Chiefly the fact 



162 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

that for ages the tide of human life has 
been flowing into it. It is a world peo- 
pled with souls which once had a home on 
this green earth. The future represents 
the value of the soul measured by dura- 
tion. There are other measures, but above 
all the measure of equality, the measure 
of influence, the measure of use. No one 
can settle the question whether one soul is 
of more meaning to himself or to others. 
We cannot go beyond the word of Paul, 
" No man liveth unto himself, and no man 
dieth unto himself." When therefore the 
preacher thinks of the worth of any soul 
before him, it cannot be in its separate- 
ness. It is a unit, but a unit in countless 
and vital combinations. 

I do not reach too far into the pastoral 
relations when I urge this interest in every 
one's soul, because in this regard the pas- 
tor and preacher are one. One of the most 
serious questions which a preacher can ask 
himself is this : What am I doing when I 
am not preaching? Where are my thoughts, 
my plans, my imperative desires and long- 
ings? Towards what ends am I pushing 
with the constant energies of my nature? 



TO MEN 163 

Preaching is not an end, but it is very- 
easy to make it an end. Most preachers 
do make it a chief end, in that they make 
it the climax of their energy and thought 
and spiritual purpose. The strong tides 
of their spiritual being do not underrun 
their preaching, flowing out with it into 
the great life toward which it points. Dr. 
Pentecost has told this of himself. He 
was preaching at one time in the presence 
of Dr. Bonar, enjoying, as a man will, the 
luxury of proclaiming the gospel. Dr. 
Bonar came to him at the close, touched 
him on the shoulder, and said, " You love 
to preach, don't you ? " " Yes, I do." " Do 
you love men to whom you preach ? " That 
was a much deeper question, and it is worth 
every man's asking, when he finds himself 
more in love with the truth, or with the 
proclamation of it, than with men to whom, 
and for whom, the truth has been revealed. 
There is a love of men which the sermon 
cannot satisfy. And the right to preach to 
men carries with it other rights in their be- 
half. Preaching is simply the acknowledged 
sign, the warrant of what Bushnell calls 
"the property rights we have in souls." 



1 64 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

The man, therefore, as he follows after the 
preacher is not a spiritual impertinence. 
He may of course make himself such, but 
not if he acts wisely and tenderly, and 
above all things manfully. It is the habit 
of some preachers to follow the sermon 
with the personal letter, others with timely 
conversation, others with the opportunity 
of the after meeting. In some cases these 
personal methods may not be necessary. 
Preaching may be so quickening as to 
create of itself an office practice for the 
preacher. Those who have listened to his 
words may be so awakened and stimulated 
that they will come to him and ask him for 
further help in the life of the soul. 

When a preacher has made a man aware 
of his soul, then comes the work of helping 
him to save it. And when that is well be- 
gun then the long task of showing him how 
to use his soul. This is the continuous 
work of the preacher ; this the work of 
edification, the building up of character, 
through the right and noble use of the 
powers of the whole nature. Preaching 
to this end, as you can well see, must be 
thoroughly constructive and stimulating. 



TO MEN 165 

It must point out ways of helpfulness, and 
set the feet of men in them. It must show 
the opportunities which attend every ad- 
vance in this life, every gain in knowledge, 
all increase in riches, all growths in repu- 
tation or influence. It must hold secure 
to the great consistencies, honesty, justice, 
charity of mind as well as of heart, nobility 
of thought and of ambition, humility, and, 
if need be, self-sacrifice. 

I had hoped that I might be able to say 
something about the relation of the preacher 
to men in combination, that is, to society, 
without exceeding the proper length of this 
lecture, or breaking its unity. But I find 
that I must reserve what I would otherwise 
say now to my next lecture on the pulpit 
and the church. 

Before I close I wish to go back to 
gather up a phrase which I quoted from 
Dr. Bushnell, namely, the property rights 
which we have in souls. It would not be 
altogether fair to insist, as I have done, 
upon the obligations under which we stand 
to men, so strong and severe, so hard to 
fulfill, so hard even to understand, without 
showing in a word how the fulfillment of 



166 WHAT THE PREACHER OWES 

them goes into the making of the preacher. 
The preacher cannot hope to make any 
lasting contribution to the truth. Most 
sermons are a waste, viewed as literature. 
Some go out into their generation and 
gain a wide constituency. Here and there 
a sermon lives in tradition. It did some- 
thing that men never cease to admire and 
wonder at, though they may be no longer 
impressed by it. Occasionally a sermon 
goes over. Some preachers cover two gen- 
erations, their own and the next. 

But as the preacher tries to reckon the per- 
manent in his work, as he stops from time to 
time, as he surely will, to ask himself what 
does it all mean to him, his only sure and 
satisfactory answer will come from men. 
His property rights are there. There are 
his spiritual earnings. The return into his 
life is out of the life of men, first, in what 
they are, changed in the direction of their 
purposes, or changed in the level of their 
aspirations ; then in what they have done, 
the better deed in place of the low or base, 
or in place of no deed at all — the helpful, 
saving word in place of the unspoken, un- 
thought word of brotherly kindness and 



TO MEN 167 

charity. Something of all this finds its way- 
back into the preacher's consciousness, and 
helps him to preach. And if men do not 
tell him, let him not be faithless and unbe- 
lieving. A preacher is entitled to the full 
advantage of the known and unknown re- 
sults of his ministry. The unknown, I say; 
for one may be sure that if there be known 
results there will be unknown results, with 
the probability, yes, the certainty, that the 
unknown will exceed the known. That goes 
with the nature of the service. And some- 
times a glimpse into the unknown, a mes- 
sage from the unexpected, though it be of 
another's work, tells him what to believe of 
himself and of his own work. 

Canon Twells, in one of his colloquies 
on Preaching, introduces his readers to a 
conversation between a rector and a vicar 
on results in preaching. The conversation 
opens with a bit of raillery, but as it pro- 
ceeds it grows more serious. At one point 
the rector falls into a desponding mood, 
like Bunyan's Christian, and the vicar plays 
the part of Bunyan's Hopeful. The collo- 
quy closes with this incident, told by the 
vicar : — 



si 



168 WHAT PREACHER OWES TO MEN 

" A friend of mine, a layman, was once in 
the company of a very eminent preacher, 
then in the decline of life. My friend hap- 
pened to remark what a comfort it must be 
to think of all the good he had done by his 
gift of eloquence. The eyes of the old 
man filled with tears. ' You little know ! 
You little know ! If I ever turned one 
heart from the ways of disobedience to the 
wisdom of the just, God has withheld the 
assurance from me. I have been admired 
and flattered and run after ; but how gladly 
I would forget all that, to be told of one 
single soul I have been instrumental in 
saving ! ' The eminent preacher entered 
into his rest. There was a great funeral. 
Many passed around the grave who had 
oftentimes hung entranced upon his lips. 
My friend was there, and by his side was 
a stranger, who was so deeply moved that 
when all was over my friend said to him, 
* You knew him, I suppose ? ' 4 Knew him,' 
was the reply, ' no ; I never spoke to him, 
but I owe to him my soul.' " 



VII 

THE PULPIT AND THE CHURCH 

If the question were asked under some 
forms of Christianity, what is the deter- 
mining factor in the making or the un- 
making of the preacher ? the answer would 
be, the church. In saying this, I do not 
refer, of course, to those forms of Christian- 
ity which practically obliterate preaching. 
Ritualism has no logical place for preach- 
ing, because in its conception of the church 
it makes no sufficient allowance for the per- 
sonality of the preacher. The Church of 
Rome, it is to be said, whether logically or 
illogically, has always honored preaching. 
It has always kept great preachers at com- 
mand, and has made special provision for 
their training. 

But although I am not prepared to ac- 
cept some theories of the church which are 
held under Protestant Christianity, where 
preaching still remains a power, I am desir- 



170 THE PULPIT 

ous of emphasizing most clearly the rela- 
tion of the preacher, as such, to the church. 
And if I do not speak of his obligation to 
the church in the same way in which I 
have spoken of his obligation to the truth 
and to men, it is because I conceive of his 
relation to it in another aspect. I want to 
show you how much the church means to 
the preacher, how it ministers to him, sup- 
ports and strengthens him, how in its local 
organizations it offers itself to him to be 
used as a great agency or instrument for 
the advancement of righteousness, and how 
it becomes the reservoir into which he may 
pour his life, the institution into which he 
may build himself and his work. 

It is the church, we are to remind our- 
selves at the outset, which gives to the 
preacher validity to his message. Formally 
this is effected through the preacher's ordi- 
nation. That act authorizes him to stand 
before men in the name of the church, and 
to declare the truth under its sanctions. 
The church guarantees the character of 
the preacher, his fitness to speak, and in 
general the subject matter of his preach- 
ing, no mean advantage to any man at any 



AND THE CHURCH 171 

time, but of incalculable value at the begin- 
ning of one's profession. No man starts 
upon his professional course with such a 
presumption in his favor as the preacher. 
The church creates that presumption. Or- 
dination is far more to the minister than 
the sanction of one's profession which ad- 
mits to the bar or to the practice of medi- 
cine. It carries with it an assurance, coop- 
eration, and protection, for which there is 
no parallel. 

I will take a moment's time to bring out 
the moral sympathy and support which un- 
derlie the ecclesiastical form. Let me con- 
trast in this regard the prophet with the 
preacher. The prophet was an anointed 
man. There was a prophetic succession. 
But the prophet was a lonely man. He 
dwelt apart. He did not frequent the 
places where men came together, where 
life thickened and grew dense. He was a 
man of occasions. The infrequency of his 
appearances, his remoteness from the com- 
mon ways, gave the power of mystery to 
his words. And the truth which he uttered 
was chiefly for occasions. It was not the 
every-day subject of the pulpit. It was not 



172 THE PULPIT 

necessarily the unknown truth which he 
proclaimed, but it was the unapplied truth, 
the neglected truth. The prophet was 
strongest when he was armed with the 
antagonism of truth. His chief reliance 
was the awakened conscience. Recall the 
commission of Jeremiah : " Thou therefore 
gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak 
unto them all that I command thee : be 
not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound 
thee before them. For, behold, I have 
made thee this day a defensed city, and an 
iron pillar, and brazen walls against the 
whole land, against the kings of Judah, 
against the princes thereof, against the 
priests thereof, and against the people of 
the land. And they shall fight against 
thee ; but they shall not prevail against 
thee ; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, 
to deliver thee." 

Preaching has in it the prophetic ele- 
ment. The preacher is charged to de- 
clare the whole counsel of God, and that, 
still, whether men will hear or will forbear 
to hear. There are times when denuncia- 
tion must be strong and persistent, when a 
preacher must lift up his voice before a 



AND THE CHURCH 173 

community and cry aloud and spare not. 
But that is the unusual work of the pul- 
pit. Ordinarily the preacher speaks with 
the consenting voice of the church. The 
common truth which he utters is a part of 
the common experience. Preaching at its 
best is quite apt to be an interpretation 
of the Christian consciousness at its best. 
As the preacher rises in the utterance of 
his faith, men about him are saying, " Yes, 
that is what we have felt, but have never 
been able to tell. Go on, speak for us, that 
is our faith." Preaching on its interpreta- 
tive and representative side is a recognized 
fact. The pulpit and the church cannot 
be separated in the minds of men. The 
validity of the preacher's message is more 
than that which comes from any ecclesias- 
tical guarantee ; it has in it the consenting, 
supporting, persuading life of the church. 

Intimately connected with this direct 
power which the church confers upon the 
preacher is the aid which it affords him 
through various forms of religious impres- 
sions. Of course this is more apparent in 
the liturgical than in the non-liturgical 
churches, but the church always and every- 



i 7 4 THE PULPIT 

where creates an atmosphere which is un- 
mistakable. Reduce the church in all its 
appointments to the minimum, let it be the 
old New England meeting-house, with a 
service as plain and bare as the walls of 
the house, still the impression is there. Do 
you not remember the fine touch in " Nor- 
wood," as Mr. Beecher describes the close 
of a service in the village church? The 
horse jockey of the village and the doctor 
have driven up, and are waiting for the 
congregation to come out. The jockey 
is talking glibly to the doctor about the 
neighbors' teams which are standing in the 
horse shed. Soon the last hymn is heard. 
" ' There, doctor, there 's the last hymn ! ' 
It rose upon the air, softened by distance 
and the inclosure of the building, rose and 
fell in regular movement. Even Hiram's 
tongue ceased. The vireo, in the top of 
the elm, hushed its shrill snatches. Again 
the hymn rose, and this time fuller and 
louder, as if the whole congregation had 
caught the spirit. Men's and women's 
voices, and little children's, were in it. 
Hiram said, without any of his usual pert- 
ness : ' Doctor, there 's somethin' in folks' 



AND THE CHURCH 175 

singin' when you are outside the church 
that makes you feel as though you ought 
to be inside.' " 

The art of religious impression as it has 
been developed by the church invites the 
study of the preacher. I assume that you 
approach the subject without prejudice. 
Puritanism no longer exists as a protest 
against form in worship. The Puritan of 
to-day is not at this point the purifier. 
The last determined opposition to the en- 
richment of worship of which I had per- 
sonal knowledge was in the case of a 
clergyman of the old school, who, after the 
anthem had been introduced into the ser- 
vice of his church against his will, used to 
rise immediately at the close, and say, 
" We will now begin the worship of God 
by the use of such a hymn." 

The difficulty to-day in the non-liturgi- 
cal churches lies in the cheap imitation, 
or in the inartistic substitute. Nothing is 
so appalling to a reverent mind as the in- 
troduction of the programme into so many 
churches. Instead of an order of service 
we have a musical exhibition, which takes 
the fortune of the taste of the musical 



176 THE PULPIT 

committee of the society. It was a Sun- 
day evening performance of this sort which 
brought out the famous bit of caricature 
from Dr. Burton, closing with the " final 
bellowings of the organ, after which dark- 
ness, silence, and the restored presence of 
God." 

Where shall we look for our protection 
against these tendencies ? Partly to the 
people themselves whose tastes are being 
refined, and who are becoming more able 
to discriminate between the true and the 
false in art, but chiefly to the ministry, as 
it is being trained to the appreciation, if 
not to the full knowledge, of the art of 
spiritual impression. I put the preacher 
especially on his guard against the usurpa- 
tion by the sermon of the prerogatives of 
worship. Let him beware of thinking of 
anything which precedes the sermon as a 
part of the " preliminary service." With 
all the stress which I have laid upon 
preaching, I do not exalt it above the 
other great office of worship. Above all, 
let the preacher remember, that in the 
simplicity of our order of faith he is the 
priest as well as the preacher. It is as 



AND THE CHURCH 177 

needful for him to enter the pulpit in the 
spirit of devotion as in the spirit of con- 
vincement or persuasion. The sermon 
ought not to dominate his mind so that 
he cannot pray without reading his ser- 
mon into his prayer. Of course the 
danger is greater from the extempore than 
from the written sermon. Yet in either 
case the mind may be so possessed by a 
given subject that it is inhospitable to the 
thousand desires and longings which are 
to find expression in prayer, if the min- 
ister is to interpret the heart of the con- 
gregation. 

Pardon a personal reference. Early in 
my ministry, as I was endeavoring to train 
myself toward extempore speech, I found 
that the most serious drawback was the 
preoccupation of mind with the thought 
of the sermon during the period of wor- 
ship. The difficulty became so great that 
I determined to free my mind of the ser- 
mon for that time at any cost, and as I 
had no verbal memory, I resolved to write 
into the sermon, to the amount of five or 
six minutes, and read what I had written, 
passing then into the method of extempore 



178 THE PULPIT 

speech. The precaution thus taken became 
a habit, — a most vicious habit as far as 
the method of preaching was concerned, — 
but a concession on the part of the sermon 
to worship, which I accounted none too 
great a price for me to pay. The methods 
of two personal friends of which I chance 
to have knowledge are better. One of 
them is in the habit of entering the pulpit 
an hour before the service, and of going 
over the congregation in mind, family by 
family, endeavoring to call up their spirit- 
ual necessities with so great definiteness 
and vividness that his prayer may be their 
prayer. The other has made a profound 
study of the liturgies of the churches, not 
for the form but for the spirit of worship. 
He does not memorize, he does not im- 
itate, but he does seek to enter into the 
mind of the church as in its collective 
thought, or in the thought of its most de- 
vout souls, it has turned toward God. 

I advise the careful study of the devo- 
tional habit of the church. The preacher 
who is unsupported by any formal expres- 
sion of the life of the church in worship 
ought to be the more careful that he has 



AND THE CHURCH 179 

the true supports within himself. And he 
ought to be able to gain every advantage 
which is open to him in the genuine and 
unaffected use of the art of spiritual ex- 
pression. Let no man think that he can 
preach so well that it matters little how 
he prays, or how the congregation wor- 
ships. It matters much how the best 
preachers pray and how the congregations 
which listen to them worship. I recall a 
remark of Professor Ladd after he came 
out from listening to Phillips Brooks. 
" The congregation," he said, " was alive." 
The attitude and mood of the congrega- 
tion impressed him equally with the spirit- 
ual earnestness of the preacher. I have 
come away under the same impression on 
the two or three occasions when I have at- 
tended St. George's Church in New York. 
I cannot overestimate the value to the 
preacher, as the preacher, of the devotional 
spirit of the congregation. It is an in- 
spiration. Psalm and hymn, anthem and 
chant, Scripture and creed and prayer, 
whatever touches the heart of the congre- 
gation and makes it one before God, will 
minister to him in all his spiritual nature, 



180 THE PULPIT 

if he will allow himself to become re- 
sponsive to it. The church, through its 
aroused emotion, has opened the way into 
the individual heart for the entrance of his 
message. 

Not only does the church give validity 
to the message of the preacher, not only 
does it support him through the power of 
religious impression, it gives to his work 
the advantage of definite results. So far 
as the pulpit represents the oratorical tem- 
perament, there is constant danger that its 
force will be spent in the excitement of 
feeling. A great many preachers leave 
their hearers aroused, but undirected and 
unutilized. They stir to duty, but they 
point out no duties to be accomplished, 
nor do they show how duty may be done. 
Perhaps this is the most common weak- 
ness in what is otherwise very effective 
preaching. The church offers the best 
possible corrective for this weakness. It 
makes it possible for the preacher to lo- 
cate duty. It presents the opportunity in 
various ways for one who has been quick- 
ened to right doing to begin at once to 
put it into practice. It is the office of 



AND THE CHURCH 181 

the church to take the individual life from 
the moment when it begins to reach out 
after Christ, and train it to discipleship ; to 
give it congenial associations ; to provide 
it with appropriate incentives and with ap- 
propriate opportunity for growth ; to open 
to it paths of service. Where else and how 
else can the soul make so natural and com- 
plete a commitment of itself to Christ ? 
The confession of Christ is the fit response 
to the conclusion of a large part of the ser- 
mons of the preacher even when they do 
not end in the direct appeal. The cove- 
nant of the church shows the true and 
proper relation into which one is to come 
with others who are like-minded and of 
the same purpose. And when once the 
first step has been taken in the acknow- 
ledgment of Christ and in association 
with Christians, then the church stands 
for direction, helpfulness, responsibility, 
and enlargement through the fulfillment 
of duty. 

What an utterly wasteful and extrava- 
gant force the pulpit would be but for the 
church which follows after the preacher 
and gathers up and utilizes his power. 



182 THE PULPIT 

Compare the work of the evangelist in 
this regard with that of the pastor. The 
power of impression on the part of the 
evangelist is greater for the immediate 
time than that of the pastor. But if his 
work is detached it is in large degree 
dissipated. I do not overestimate statis- 
tics, but, judged by any of the large tests 
which centre in permanent results, the 
evangelist has little to show when his 
work is compared with that of the pastor, 
unless it is associated with that of the 
pastor. The church stands for economy 
in the use of means. It prevents waste. 
It makes preaching fruitful. And the 
effect of this function of the church upon 
the preacher is encouraging in the highest 
degree. No one can be indifferent to re- 
sults. The secret grief at the heart of 
many a minister is the apparent absence 
of any adequate result of his preaching. 
While he is in the act of presenting truth, 
when mind and heart are aglow, he enters 
into the joy of his calling. But as the 
years of his ministry go by without the 
return to him in changed lives, in an en- 
larged church, in results which are definite 



AND THE CHURCH 183 

and tangible, his heart begins to fail and 
grow weary. I have known preachers to 
be saved to themselves and to their 
churches by the efforts of some quiet, 
patient workers in the church who have 
known how to gather the fruitage of the 
pulpit. They have given the preacher the 
one advantage, without which his ministry 
must have steadily declined into a failure. 
With it he has risen to his task in the 
courage of spiritual success. 

And now add to these advantages the 
sense of permanency which the church 
helps to give, and you see how large is its 
ministry to the preacher. A great many 
things tend to give the preacher the sense 
of change, uncertainty, and even of inse- 
curity in his work. Men come and go. 
Sometimes the fortune of a particular 
church seems to be bound up in a given 
generation. Churches lose their position 
or character. The preacher himself is sel- 
dom a permanent force in any one com- 
munity. All the outward conditions are 
away from the permanent. Yet the real 
significance of his work is permanence. 
How shall he realize this fact ? He may 



i8 4 THE PULPIT 

live as the patriarchs lived. Abraham 
dwelt in tents with Isaac and Jacob, but 
he looked for a city which hath founda- 
tions. The preacher has the outlook of 
faith open to him. That gives the last 
satisfaction. It is the realization of eter- 
nity underneath time, the realization, as 
Carlyle says, that " time in every meanest 
moment of it rests upon eternity." But 
this is the common privilege of faith. 
The preacher has no more claim to it 
than any other believer. What is his 
hold upon the permanent, as we count 
permanence on earth ? The church is an 
institution. The ministry is a succession. 
The preacher has his fellowship without 
limit of time. How near the great souls 
of the church of long ago are to us. How 
easy it is for us to establish the intimacy 
of personal friendship with them. How 
hospitable they are, how catholic, how sin- 
cere. They live and their work lives. 
Measured by earthly standards the church 
lasts. 

" Oh, where are kings and empires now, 
Of old that went and came ? 
But, Lord, thy church is praying yet, 
A thousand years the same." 



AND THE CHURCH 185 

I think that we fail to inhabit the church 
at large as we ought. Our particular com- 
munion is small, it is a part, a small part, 
but a part implies the whole, a small part 
as much as a great part. In my Father's 
house, said Christ, are many mansions. 
Why should we not take the freedom of 
them here ? And especially in respect to 
time. What age of the church is closed 
against us ? Where should we be unwel- 
come now, whatever might have been our 
fortune then ? Who shall forbid to any one 
of us his sense of permanency in the church, 
according to the place he may make for 
himself in the unfailing succession ? 

It would be easy to enter into the long 
enumeration of the advantages of the 
church to the preacher, if he will but re- 
cognize them. But all that I have wished 
to do is to turn your thoughts that way. 
I have wanted to help you to see that the 
church is carrying on a wide and generous 
ministry in your behalf. Some of its min- 
istries I have suggested. Nothing more 
than the suggestion of them is necessary, 
if it shall succeed in making you apprecia- 
tive of what the church is capable of doing 



186 THE PULPIT 

and will do for the ministry, if its offices 
are recognized and accepted. 

What now shall we say is the relation of 
the pulpit to the church ? What are the 
preacher's obligations ? How shall he use 
his advantage honestly, generously, and to 
his own upbuilding ? My first answer is 
that the preacher should work from within 
the church. Let him not take an outside 
position, nor one as near the edge as pos- 
sible, but let him establish himself within, 
firmly and securely, and then work from 
within out. 

This statement is so general that it raises 
questions of its own. How far is the posi- 
tion of the preacher representative and how 
far is it personal ? Is he bound to utter 
the formulae of the church, or does he have 
the freedom of Christianity? And if he 
insists upon his freedom does he forfeit his 
place in the church ? I suppose that by 
common consent the preacher is the freest 
man in the service of the church. He is 
given, for necessary and evident reasons, 
the largest use of his personality. The 
church is always ready to allow the exercise 
of liberty, when it seems to be an indispen- 



AND THE CHURCH 187 

sable part of the preacher's apprehension 
of the gospel. Probably no one is judged 
so fairly, by the whole scope and aim of 
his work, as the preacher. But when the 
preacher rests his contention for liberty 
upon some one point, a point now of doc- 
trine rather than of personal enlargement, 
then he makes the contention for others as 
well as for himself. At least, if the point 
is of sufficient importance to really contend 
for in the name of freedom, it ought to be 
sufficient to contend for in the interest of 
truth. If again the truth which the church 
holds seems to him to need a large inter- 
pretation, I think that he ought to try to 
make room for it in the church. The lib- 
erty of being allowed to stretch one's self 
a little further, of being a little freer than 
others, is, after all, a small notion of lib- 
erty. Real liberty consists in making the 
church roomy enough for all men who want 
to hold the interpretation of the truth in 
question. That is something worth con- 
tending for. To give a broad truth stand- 
ing, that makes all men free. To make 
one man free, and leave the truth in bond- 
age, that leaves other men bound. 



188 THE PULPIT 

I believe, therefore, that if a preacher 
wants a liberty beyond that which is 
usually conceded to the use of one's per- 
sonality, he ought first to ask whether 
other men ought to have it, whether it 
inheres in the truth itself, and if so, then 
to try to make room for it in the church. 
I have little respect for mere assertion and 
boisterous independence. I have great re- 
spect for the serious and responsible en- 
deavor for freedom. And there is no loy- 
alty to the church, of which I am aware, 
which compels a man who feels the need, 
for himself, and for others, and for the truth, 
of more room and a larger freedom to go 
outside to get it. It is time enough to 
go out when it is proven that there is not 
sufficient room within. 

But suppose the question includes the 
conduct of a given church rather than the 
faith of the church of which it is a part. 
Suppose a church stands before a commu- 
nity charged with inconsistency. Its spir- 
itual life is too low to impress the commu- 
nity, or its moral life is such as to leave it 
without influence. I do not refer now to 
cases of personal discipline, which must 



AND THE CHURCH 189 

always be judged by themselves. I refer 
altogether to the moral or spiritual condi- 
tion of a church which makes it powerless 
for good. It is worldly, it is frivolous, it is 
niggardly, it is out of favor with the com- 
munity, and rightly so. What shall the 
preacher do? Shall he work on the outside 
the church, as far as possible independent 
of it, or shall he still work from it, taking 
his position within ? Certainly the latter. 
Let him enter all the more closely into its 
life. Let him lavish upon it all the wealth 
of his affection. Let him not play the 
Pharisee before the people at large, and 
draw attention to his own superior breadth, 
or charity, or earnestness. Let him give 
himself to the task of making the church 
broader, more charitable, more earnest, 
more human. Let him bring the best life 
of the church to the front; let him encour- 
age, stimulate, and inspire. That must be 
a dead church which will not revive under 
such treatment. When it has been re- 
vived, the preacher holds its power in the 
hollow of his hand. The true philosophy 
of the relation of the pulpit to the church 
is that of power from within. The preacher 



i 9 o THE PULPIT 

who has not first made his place strong 
and secure, who has not made himself a 
vital force within, has not established the 
relation of the pulpit to the church. 

Next to the obligation of the preacher to 
work from the church, that is, from within, 
I put the obligation to work through the 
church. A great many churches are will- 
ing to let the preacher work for them. 
They offer him, that is, not only as their 
representative, but as their substitute. That 
is not to be allowed. If the preacher will 
avail himself of the instinct of helpfulness, 
he can readily get people enough to work 
with him. They will not always work 
under him if the authority is too manifest, 
but they will work with him. What matters 
it, so that they work, and he works through 
them ? It is too much to expect that all 
preachers will be good organizers. Organ- 
ization is of advantage, but there may be 
too much of it. Machinery in a church 
is not a certain sign of strength. Some 
churches are more cumbered by it than a 
knight in mediaeval armor. The secret of 
pastoral success on the executive side is 
the ability to secure cooperation. This 



AND THE CHURCH 191 

implies first a policy. A church must know 
what it stands for, what it is expected to 
do. The policy must be made clear, and 
definite, and commanding. It must be a 
sufficient policy. A church must not be 
asked to do less than it is capable of doing. 
Nothing is so belittling as a weak, or small, 
or uninspiring policy. Ask for large things 
and expect them. And keep on asking and 
expecting, till you get them. Educate your 
people out of littleness, as you would out 
of meanness. 

A good policy will gain the support of 
good people. That is pretty sure to follow. 
Men and women will lend themselves to 
the duty which is attractive because it is 
satisfying. They will try to do it. Trust 
them in their endeavors. Distrust on your 
part is worse than blunders on their part. 
Remember that you had to learn to preach. 
It was not second nature. For two or three 
years it may have been an open problem 
whether the man would conquer the ser- 
mon, or the sermon would kill the man. 
It is not always easy for a man who is 
greatly gifted in public speech to speak in 
a social meeting or to pray. It may be still 



192 THE PULPIT 

harder for him to say the personal word to 
his neighbor. It is not easy for some men 
to give, not so easy for those who have 
money as for those who have n't it. Be 
patient. It may not be easy for some men 
to stand as moral reformers. Not all men 
are brave. Be patient still. Courage, like 
everything else, grows by success. It is 
easier to stand, when one has once seen 
that it has done some good to stand for 
the right. 

And not only have a sufficient policy, 
and show a sufficient trust in men, but take 
to yourselves the joy of companionship in 
service. Respect those who labor with 
you. Encourage them by your personal 
as well as by your official regard. Respect 
them according to their gifts. And rejoice 
in any discovery of Christian talent, as you 
would rejoice in personal wealth. Some 
persons may become representative of the 
church in larger ways of service than in 
those which the local church has to offer. 
Do not be jealous of their outside activity 
or influence. Let them understand that 
they are doing the work of the church in 
the best possible way. The only way in 



AND THE CHURCH 193 

which the church can deal with many ques- 
tions, and many interests, is through its 
representative men. You cannot make a 
church support one party, or one policy, in 
a community. There are limits to con- 
certed action, chief of which is the indi- 
vidual liberty of opinion and of conscience. 
But you can count as a continual power 
in the church any noble-minded man who 
rises to the demands of public duty. 

And one more obligation of the pulpit to 
the church is that the preacher shall work 
to it. From it, in acknowledgment of its 
position ; through it, in acknowledgment 
of its available power ; to it, in acknowledg- 
ment of its right to its own increase. The 
church is entitled to the earnings of the 
ministry. And the larger the earnings 
the more the church is entitled to them. 
A small increase might come about from 
other incentives. A large and steady in- 
crease can come only from and through the 
church. And yet one obligation which the 
preacher owes the church is to see to it that 
the church does not narrow its doors. The 
church is for the world, not the world for 
the church. It is hard to maintain this 



i 9 4 THE PULPIT 

principle under all conditions. Churches, 
like corporations, like individuals, grow 
selfish. Success is apt to develop satisfac- 
tion. Struggle is apt to develop narrow- 
ness. The preacher out of love to the 
church must see to it that it is set wide 
toward humanity. This does not mean 
that it has no tests of membership, no 
standards of character, no confession of 
faith. Open the church that way, and 
you make it no object for men to enter. 
You must make the motive to enter the 
church as deep as you make the entrance 
broad. 

There is one difficulty in our American 
church life which no one has as yet told 
us how to solve. It comes from our demo- 
cracy. Democracy demands that the church 
shall acknowledge no distinctions of class. 
The only answer which we make to this 
demand is to organize churches on social 
lines. Watch the changes in a great city. 
The moment a church loses caste it begins 
to be unpopular. Those of a given social 
standing leave the community and so the 
church, and those of another social stand- 
ing do not seem to care to come in to take 



AND THE CHURCH 195 

what is left. I can see no way of meeting 
the issue except by developing such a love 
and loyalty and reverence for the church 
as will allow us to overcome even changes 
of locality. It is a fact that the stronger 
the church feeling is, the more democratic 
in reality the church is. An Episcopal 
church will usually stay longer down town 
than a Congregational or Presbyterian 
church. 

I think that we must come to a deeper 
love for the church, if we are to make it 
answer its larger and more generous pur- 
pose toward men. For this reason I value 
all attachments to a local church. I am 
not so anxious as many are to see the rolls 
of an old church kept clean to the exact 
resident membership. A man has a right 
in the church of his father, and of his 
father's father. Spiritual ancestry counts 
for something. The old spiritual home- 
steads are sacred. Let us cherish them. 
Let us keep the identity of the best souls 
with them. 

Why should not the churches bear the 
name of the saints, — our churches bear 
the names of our saints ? What is the 



196 THE PULPIT 

church, in one of its most glorious aspects, 
but the succession of steadfast, loyal, be- 
lieving, sacrificing, conquering souls. I 
put the eleventh of Hebrews beside the 
Nicene Creed or the Westminster Confes- 
sion. I put the roll of God's elect at any 
time beside " the form of sound words " 
in which they utter their beliefs. The 
greater souls of all generations, — they 
are the living church. They maintain the 
succession. They ennoble and enlarge 
the spiritual kinship. They fix the stan- 
dards of faith and life. They live on from 
age to age to shame the selfish, the unbe- 
lieving, the faint of heart ; to show willing 
souls how to serve, to challenge brave men 
to meet the possibilities of life and death. 
Let their names stand, to be known and 
read of all men, a reminder and an ex- 
ample of "the faith once delivered to the 
saints." 

There are many things which I might 
have said of the relation of the pulpit to 
the church ; the field is very wide. What 
I have said has been with the intent of 
turning your thoughts towards your in- 
debtedness. If you succeed as preachers, 



AND THE CHURCH 197 

one large factor in your success will be the 
acknowledged ministry of the church. If 
you fail, one reason of your failure will be 
the neglect of its strong, kind, and patient 
ministry. 



VIII 

THE OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

I am conscious, as I bring this course 
of lectures to a close, how inadequate has 
been my presentation of those more vital 
aspects of preaching, which I have been 
trying to set forth. That preaching is a 
vital process from first to last I am ab- 
solutely sure. There lies its power, and 
there lies its weakness. Preaching rises 
and falls with the preacher. It is sensitive 
even to his moods. It is dependent upon 
the steadiness of his intellectual discipline, 
upon the nobility of his ambitions, upon 
the growing susceptibility of his nature to 
the highest inspirations. And yet we do 
not make sufficient account, I think, of 
this vital element in preaching, nor ap- 
prise the preacher sufficiently of the im- 
mense issues which are involved in the 
development of his personality. The 
preacher does not ask enough of him- 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 199 

self, neither does society ask enough of 
him. We want good preaching and like 
it, but we do not expect it, as we ought. 
As Pascal says, " We go to our library and 
take down a book, expecting to find an 
author, and lo, to our joy, we find a man." 
We go to church expecting to hear a ser- 
mon, and lo, to our joy, it may be, we hear 
a preacher. The attitude of men toward 
the pulpit is expressed in the hope of dis- 
covery rather than in the confidence of ex- 
pectation. Public sentiment at this point 
needs to be changed. Not that anything 
has come in to take the place of preaching 
in the public mind. There has been dur- 
ing the past decade a revival of the spirit 
of worship in the non-liturgical churches. 
It was greatly needed. The result has 
been much experimentation, but with it a 
large and positive enrichment of public 
worship. The spiritual life of the church 
has been quickened. There had been an 
earlier revival of Biblical study. The 
Scriptures have been searched as at no 
previous time in the history of the church. 
The spiritual life of the church has been 
quickened by this also. But preaching 



200 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

has not been rendered less necessary be- 
cause of the increase of worship or of 
Biblical knowledge. These new influences 
have properly reduced the time of the ser- 
mon, but they have greatly ministered to 
its power. There is no religious any 
more than there is any secular substitute 
for preaching. It is the vernacular of the 
gospel. The language of creed or chant 
can never express the glad tidings as one 
man can tell them to another. Preaching, 
we say, is the soul of Protestantism ; but 
why the soul of Protestantism unless it is 
equally the soul of Christianity ? Let us 
not draw our inspiration for preaching from 
anything that is intermediate or formal. I 
like to go back in my search for first things 
to the saying of an old teacher in the sem- 
inary. " I teach," he said, " that Congrega- 
tionalism is a passing form of Puritanism ; 
that Puritanism is a passing form of Pro- 
testantism ; that Protestantism is a passing 
form of Christianity." 

Back in the heart of the everlasting gos- 
pel lies the necessity and the guarantee 
of preaching. And particularly because 
Christianity can get no adequate expression 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 201 

except through preaching. It cannot com- 
municate itself, its spirit, its tone, its de- 
sires, its certainties in any other way. Its 
incentives call for the preacher. They are 
made to stir him. For Christianity is the 
revelation of a great hope as well as of a 
great love. There is the secret of its power. 
Men are saved by hope. Love that did not 
issue in hope would be a futile and pathetic 
love. 

In this last lecture I want to try to make 
clear to you how much of the power of 
preaching lies hidden in the optimism of 
Christianity. 

Whatever incentives may come to the 
preacher from any of the causes to which I 
have referred from time to time, nothing 
comes to him so fresh and quick from the 
heart of Christianity as this incentive of 
the great and sure hope. And Christianity 
is, I believe, returning to its early opti- 
mism. There have been times in the his- 
tory of Christianity of sad depression, times 
when Christianity was not itself. There 
have been times when Christianity lived 
upon borrowed strength quite as much as 
upon its own. Its doctrines were not dis- 



202 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

tinctive. Its language was not that of the 
New Testament. Its tone was not true to 
the life of Jesus. And there have been 
times when Christianity has been over- 
shadowed by some prevailing doubt, pass- 
ing under the eclipse of faith. Christianity 
has at such times remained true to itself, 
but it has not been able to communicate 
its spirit to the heart of the world. Men 
have not wanted to disbelieve, they have 
simply not been able to believe. 

I think that no poet has caught so truly 
this spirit of unwilling doubt as Matthew 
Arnold. Listen to his lament : — 

" Oh, had I lived in that great day ■ 
How had its glory new 
Filled earth and heaven, and caught away 
My ravished spirit too. 

" No thoughts that to the world belong 
Had stood against the wave 
Of love, which set so fresh and strong 
From Christ's then open grave. 

" While we believed, on earth he went, 
And open stood his grave : 
Men called from chamber, church, and tent, 
And Christ was by to save. 

" Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
In the lone Syrian town, 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 203 

And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
The Syrian stars look down." 

The religious life of the past generation 
has found a true, because contradictory, 
expression in Tennyson and Matthew Ar- 
nold. Tennyson has given expression to 
the strong and irresistible, but undefined 
hope which has held its place in our hearts; 
Matthew Arnold has given equal expres- 
sion to the widespread, unwilling, pathetic 
doubt which has found its way at times 
within. We have been strangely confused 
in feeling by these alternating moods and 
experiences. Now it has seemed as if Ten- 
nyson's hope was the incoming tide of faith; 
and now it has seemed as if Matthew Ar- 
nold's doubt was the undertow which was 
sweeping us out again to sea. There are 
signs, I believe, that the confusion is pass- 
ing away. We are beginning to come out 
into the calm assurances of Christianity. 
The hope which greets us is not the out- 
come of sentiment. It is not a reaction 
from past uncertainty and doubt. It has 
its own reasons, some of which I will bring 
before you, as I view the present religious 
experience and faith. 



204 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

The tone of Christianity is determined 
primarily by the thought of God. What- 
ever the prevailing thought of God is, that, 
more than all things else, makes Christian- 
ity what it is in sentiment and expression. 
No one can fail to see that the theological 
discussions of the past years, except those 
on purely critical questions, have had to do 
with the nature and disposition of God, and 
with the methods of his working. As the 
result of these discussions some things are 
beginning to be clear. 

It is beginning to be clear, as it seems to 
me, that we did not say the final word when 
we declared the change in theology from 
the conception of sovereignty to the con- 
ception of fatherhood. I do not know that 
we could have secured certain necessary 
results in any other way, but the result we 
did secure was not altogether complete and 
satisfying. The fatherhood of God was a 
satisfying conception of the personal rela- 
tion of the human soul to God, especially 
as interpreted through the sonship of Jesus. 
I recall the assurance which came to my 
own thought when I read the confession 
of faith of Richard Hutton, of the London 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 205 

"Spectator," as he passed over from Uni- 
tarianism into the Church of England, 
given in his treatise on "The Incarnation 
and Principles of Evidence." 

God, he said in substance, is our Father 
because he is eternally the Father. That 
is guaranteed by the sonship of Christ. 
No new relation is created to meet the 
need of men. It is the same principle at 
work toward men in turn which had al- 
ways been in the heart of God, which had 
its satisfaction in the eternal love of the 
Father and of the Son. Nothing could 
be more satisfying than that statement. 
Within the limits of its application the 
thought was complete. 

But I really think that none of us have 
been satisfied altogether with the popular 
presentation of the thought of the father- 
hood of God, as it has been applied to all 
the relations of God to men and to the 
universe. Whatever we might put into it, 
and say belonged there by right, others 
would ignore, and thus leave the concep- 
tion incomplete and insufficient for the 
satisfaction of truth. I think that we have 
felt the need of a larger sense of power 



206 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

and determination in the attitude of God 
to men, greater even than could be ex- 
pressed in the thought of sacrifice. And 
so I welcome, not the return of thought 
from fatherhood to sovereignty, but the 
advance of sovereignty into fatherhood, 
the incorporation, the absorption, if you 
will, of fatherhood into sovereignty, to give 
it character, and disposition, and direction. 
What we want to know in order to satisfy 
the optimism of Christianity is, not simply 
that God loves us, but that God is for us. 
We want sovereignty relieved of all doubt 
about its disposition and action. The idea 
of the fatherhood of God gave us that 
relief. It set sovereignty free from all lim- 
itations, free from an arbitrary election, and 
limited atonement, and a restricted provi- 
dence. It left it " the power of God unto 
salvation unto every one that believeth." 
Now we can read the eighth of Romans, 
and rejoice in it. We can read it aloud, 
everywhere, to all men. We can read it 
beside the parable of the prodigal son. 

And with the advance in the concep- 
tion of God, the conception of his love 
reinforced by power, we have a correspond- 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 207 

ing advance in the conception of the work 
of Christ. Here again, I think, we have 
felt that there has been an insufficient use 
made of the power of Christ. His human- 
ity has been brought to the front in every 
form of promise and incentive. It has 
been an infinite relief to turn from dis- 
putations about his work, about his atone- 
ment even, to the real Jesus as he lived, 
and taught, and worked, and suffered, and 
died. But in all our uses of the humanity 
of Jesus, we have not been able to fathom 
the meaning of his sacrifice or of the law 
of sacrifice which he laid down. Aid has 
come to us from an unexpected source. 
The incoming of the theory of evolution 
has done more, I believe, than all else to 
develop and solemnize the thinking of our 
times. For it has been a revelation or ex- 
posure of the suffering, the unconscious 
sacrifice, going on in all the orders and 
ranks of life leading up to man. And 
surely, though almost imperceptibly, it has 
been at work to change our conception of 
human life. It has overthrown our easy 
settlements of questions of human rights 
and human obligations. Take its influence 



208 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

upon the thought of man in his political 
relations. I quote from Professor Royce : 

" The dignity of human nature under 
the old science lay in its permanence. 
Because of such permanence one could 
prove all men to be naturally equal, and 
our own Declaration of Independence is 
thus founded upon speculative principles, 
that, as they were then stated, have been 
rendered meaningless by the modern doc- 
trine of evolution. Valuable indeed," he 
goes on to say, " was all this unhistorical 
analysis of the world and of man, valuable 
as a preparation for the coming insight ; 
but how unvital, how unspiritual, how 
crude seems now all that eighteenth cen- 
tury conception of the mathematically per- 
manent, the essentially unprogressive and 
stagnant human nature in the empty dig- 
nity of its inborn rights, when compared 
with our modern conception of the grow- 
ing, struggling, historically continuous hu- 
manity, whose rights are nothing until it 
wins them in the tragic process of civiliza- 
tion." 

We are at last beginning to have a view 
of the place which sacrifice holds in the 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 209 

development of nature, in the order of so- 
ciety, and therefore in the saving of man. 
We see in a new light the meaning of the 
great iterations of Jesus about the neces- 
sity of sacrifice, — words which he applied 
sometimes to himself, sometimes to all 
men. Above all, we see the necessity 
which lay upon him from the beginning 
to the end, from his temptation to his 
cross, to ratify this law. We see how the 
hope of the race was bound up in his un- 
swerving loyalty to the principle, in that 
unfaltering courage which led him up to 
Jerusalem, in full view of the end. As 
the method of Jesus comes out more 
clearly before the eyes of this generation, 
we are enabled to mark its place in the law 
of the universe, and also to see how weak 
and inconsistent any other method would 
have been, and therefore to realize how 
great and sure is our hope of its success in 
the spiritual salvation of the world. 

And in like manner there has come to 
us a clearer understanding of the power of 
the spirit of God in the world, as manifest 
in the continuity of God's working. We 
have been led, perhaps I may say forced, 



210 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

to recognize the universality of the work 
of the spirit of God, its work in all times 
and all places. We have been reading 
history not only with a larger intelligence, 
but with a broader faith and a wider spirit- 
ual vision. Great spaces in history, whole 
ages, that were blanks have been filled in 
with God's plans and with his presence. 
And although we have not been able to 
apportion all things aright, we have been 
able to see, if not compelled to believe in, 
the continuity of God's working. Doubt- 
less we have not yet gained the full per- 
spective. The mystery of the world is not 
solved. What we call providence does not 
always take the course to be expected, or 
even, as we thought, to be desired. The 
Christian believer may still cry out with 
Lessing, " Go Thine inscrutable way, Eter- 
nal Providence. Only let me not despair 
of Thee because of Thine inscrutableness. 
Let me not despair in Thee even if Thy 
steps appear to me to be going back. 
Thou hast on Thine Eternal way so much 
to carry on together ! so much to do ! so 
many side steps to take ! " 

And yet some things are plain and sure. 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 211 

The great plan itself is growing plain and 
sure, and more glorious to the Christian 
intelligence and faith. It is becoming 
more evident that there is a divine order 
in the world. And the tone of Christian- 
ity is changing with the larger and clearer 
apprehension of the fact. This is the first 
reason which justifies the present optimism 
of Christianity. It has its rational support 
and incentive in the conception of sover- 
eignty as directed and applied by the hand 
of love, of sacrifice as the law of the uni- 
verse, of the divine order, as seen in the 
continuity of God's working. 

But Christianity takes its tone also at a 
given time from the particular truth or 
doctrine upon which stress at the time is 
laid. The incoming truth of to-day brings 
in with it, perhaps above all other distinc- 
tive Christian doctrines with the exception 
of the doctrine of immortality, the element 
of hopefulness. It is the truth of the 
kingdom of God, the kingdom of God on 
earth. I refer now to the doctrine, not to 
the fact. The incentive to hope always 
lies in the truth, more than by any possi- 
bility it can ever lie in the fact. It is the 



\ 



212 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

ideal which stirs us to faith. We keep 
our eye on the goal, even though it be, as 
has been said, a flying goal. 

The truth of the kingdom of God has 
always existed. It has been an insepara- 
ble part of Christianity. Jesus preached it. 
He made it central in his preaching. But 
it has never had the separateness and dis- 
tinctness of a doctrine. It has never found 
its way into our articles of faith in any 
specific form. We have not tried to formu- 
late it, as we have formulated the doctrine 
of the person of Christ, or of human na- 
ture, or of the church, or even of the last 
things. And I do not know that we are 
trying to formulate it now. But somehow 
the truth is here. It is in men's thoughts, 
it is on their lips, it is stirring at their 
hearts. 

You may see the negative effects of its 
power in our present conceptions of the 
church. How small and petty our separa- 
tions and divisions are beginning to seem, 
our denominations and sects, in the light of 
that broader and more comprehensive idea 
which has taken possession of our minds. 
One must either secularize the church as 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 213 

the Romanist usually does, or reduce it 
to technicalities as the ritualist does, to 
get any satisfaction out of mere church- 
isms. We are all trying to get together 
on the spiritual, the ethical, and the intel- 
lectual side. We work together in sur- 
prising ways, and we think together, or at 
least we think above the separating lines. 
We do not reason any longer by denomi- 
nations. We reason as scholars, or as 
workers, or as preachers. Church unity is 
not a fact ; perhaps it never will be. But 
Christian unity is a great deal more of a 
fact than it was twenty years ago, ten 
years ago, one year ago. It now begins 
to have dimensions. You can point to it. 
Anybody can see it. 

But the special fact to which I wish to 
call your attention is the courage which is 
taking possession of the church at large 
under the incoming of this truth. The 
courage to which I refer is seen in the 
new objects which Christianity is seeking 
to gain. Christianity began with the con- 
version of individuals. It has always been 
and always will be the divine work of Chris- 
tianity to save the individual soul. Pro- 



2i 4 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

testantism gave a mighty impulse to that 
work, but it inheres in Christianity. This 
is not so much a matter of courage as of 
patient and sacrificing love. The courage 
of Christianity came out more clearly in 
the conception of the modern missionary. 
It was still the thought of individual sal- 
vation. Souls in heathen lands were the 
objects of search and rescue. But gradu- 
ally the idea grew and enlarged itself into 
that of the saving of the lands themselves. 
It finally comprehended tribes and peoples 
and races. 

The present advance is more courageous 
still. Christianity is now aiming at the 
forces which make up civilization, to purify, 
control, and direct them. If there has been 
any loss of interest in missions it is due, I 
think, very largely to this transfer of inter- 
est to the various forces of society and state 
which need to be more thoroughly chris- 
tianized. Christianity is becoming might- 
ily concerned about Christendom. We are 
beginning to understand, we have been 
suddenly awakened to, the sense of what I 
call the inevitableness of Christianity as a 
power in the world. The Christian nations 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 215 

are moving under an irresistible momen- 
tum. Nothing can be so impressive as to 
stand in the presence of a great moral law 
when it is operating on a grand scale. 
Such a law is now in operation all over the 
world. It is the law which Christ enunci- 
ated: "To every one that hath shall be 
given, and he shall have abundantly, and 
from him that hath not shall be taken 
away even that which he hath." Under 
the working of this law the transfer is 
now being made from lower civilizations 
to higher, as before it had been made from 
pagan to Christian. It is in some ways a 
sad spectacle which we are now witnessing, 
— old nations breaking up, old races losing 
place, and new nations and races advancing 
and coming upon them, often in the spirit 
of greed and competition, to gather the 
spoils. While the process was going on in 
Africa we gave little heed to it. Now that 
it is at work in Asia, on a larger scale and 
before venerable races and civilizations, it 
is startling and appalling. But it is inev- 
itable. The law will work, but it may be 
made to work in Christian as well as in un- 
christian ways. 



216 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

And now it has come to us. The great 
national and international question which 
has been so suddenly thrust upon us, and 
which has so sobered the nation, is this 
same question of the inevitable transfer 
of power from the lower civilization to the 
higher, from the less Christian to the more 
Christian. We cannot escape the law. We 
cannot delay it beyond its time. But the 
responsibility of seeing that it works in a 
Christian way is our responsibility, like 
that of England or of any other Christian 
nation in the East. It is this responsibility 
which is now giving us pause. It is this 
which sobers us. We are not acting in 
the haste or indifference which comes of 
the spirit of greed. We feel something of 
the solemnity which comes to one who is a 
part of an inevitable situation. We begin 
to understand that it may be as solemn a 
thing to gain as to lose, to be the one to 
whom it shall be given as to be the one 
"from whom it shall be taken, even that 
which he hath." 

And yet all these changes and transfers 
are a part of the problem which Christian- 
ity has created. It has made a new world. 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 217 

It has changed in every way the balance 
of power. When Mommsen dates modern 
history from the transfer of power from the 
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, he gives 
also the ground of the change which was 
to mark the moral advance of the world. 
Christianity is in the blood of the races 
which are in power. And the courage of 
the church lies in the fact that Christianity 
is now beginning to deal with its own crea- 
tions, with its own institutions and laws 
and industries, in the endeavor to set them 
right. It is a greater work than that of 
evangelizing the world, though no more 
sacred. It is a part of the threefold pro- 
blem, which Dr. Hitchcock used to say 
was always present to Christianity, — to 
keep, to gain, to recover. Christianity has 
dropped a nation or a race here and there 
on its westward march. These must be 
recovered, like the peoples won from its 
grasp by Mohammedanism. It is at the 
same time seeking the remoter peoples of 
India, Japan, China. It must still keep 
those in hand, the peoples of Europe and 
America. 

It is at this last point that the problem is 



218 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

evidently the closest Christianity is might- 
ily congested at the modern centres, Lon- 
don, Paris, Berlin, New York, and the forces 
with which it has to deal are more difficult 
to control than those which confronted the 
old civilizations. Modern civilization intro- 
duces its own forces, having their seat in 
the market, which are quite as strong as 
those which raged on the field of war. 
Turn which way we will, the emphasis falls 
on some situation in the kingdom of God. 
Every form of spiritual activity, every 
method of material advancement, every 
new movement of a people or a race, 
brings the idea to the front. We cannot 
escape it. We are not trying to escape it. 
It is the inspiring truth which is now gath- 
ering in the consciousness of the church, 
and is being distributed through the con- 
sciousness of the individual preacher to 
react upon his personality. 

I can call your attention to but one 
other reason for the present optimism of 
Christianity. 

The tone of Christianity at a given time 
depends altogether upon those who are 
most responsive to its claims. Where is 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 219 

Christianity making its strongest appeal to- 
day? Upon whom in our generation does 
the appeal fall with the greatest recognition? 
Where is the spirit of consecration the 
readiest, and the most urgent? I should 
say that in a peculiar degree, and within a 
wide range, Christianity had laid hold upon 
the younger life of our time. 

It is a very important question with any 
organization, Does it have its available 
force within call ? The most available force 
of the church lies in the generation which 
has time before it sufficient for a given plan. 
Movements which affect the future of the 
church and society usually originate with 
young men, not because they are more in- 
ventive or necessarily more earnest, but 
because they have time to carry them out. 
There is a manifest awakening to-day in 
that generation of the church which has 
time for carrying out its plans. It may 
be too much to say that plans have been 
formed. It is not too much to say that de- 
sires and ambitions have been quickened. 
I put in evidence the various groups which 
largely gather up the incoming life of the 
church in its various parts, — the Society 



22o OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

of Christian Endeavor, the Brotherhood 
of St. Andrew, the Students' Volunteer 
Movement, and the movement toward Col- 
lege Settlements in the great cities, which 
though not in all cases distinctly of the 
church is dominated by the religious spirit 
— these, and their equivalents in the differ- 
ent communions, Protestant and Catholic. 
I might add to this evidence the testimony, 
in some cases the unexpected testimony, of 
those who have to do with our educational 
and religious institutions as to the serious- 
ness and earnestness of the incoming gen- 
eration. I have no hesitancy in affirming, 
within the limits of my observation, the 
promise of greater moral power in the gen- 
eration preparing for action than is to be 
found in that now in action. 

This movement all along the line starts 
from the common principle of consecration, 
and converges, or can be made to converge, 
toward some end for the betterment of hu- 
manity. Something of this result is doubt- 
less due to the change of emphasis on the 
part of the church from experience to con- 
secration, a change which some may depre- 
cate. It is but fair to state that the teach- 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 221 

ings of the church were formerly repressive 
rather than directive, tending to introspec- 
tion rather than to action; but that does 
not materially lessen the value of the fact 
with which we are concerned. That fact is, 
let me repeat it in another form, the heroic 
is not far off. There is, on the part of the 
better life in training, a growing sensitive- 
ness to human conditions. There is a grow- 
ing responsiveness to ideals of duty. Per- 
haps it may have no sufficient outcome, 
but if such be the result, it will be the first 
disappointment of the kind in Christian 
history. 

The tone of Christianity is that of per- 
petual youth. It is unnatural when Chris- 
tianity cannot incorporate the optimism of 
youth into its own optimism. Not every 
age has succeeded in making this incorpo- 
ration. Our age has succeeded in a mar- 
velous degree. Its success constitutes in 
a great part its religious enthusiasm. It 
gives an inspiring spectacle. Just as it is 
pathetic to see a generation passing away, 
lamenting its unfinished work, losing heart 
because it has failed in its plans, so it is 
inspiring to see a generation come in with 



222 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

undaunted hope, and with eager hands, 
to take up its own tasks and carry them 
on to a hoped-for completion. The new 
generation may make no greater relative 
advance than the old, but like each which 
went before it has the joy of its service 
and of its hope. 

I am grateful in your behalf that as you 
enter upon this vital process which deter- 
mines the making or the unmaking of the 
preacher, your age is on the whole with you 
and not against you. You must find your 
encouragement as you look about you, per- 
haps as much outside the ministry as within. 
I should not say that this was peculiarly 
the age of the preacher ; but it does belong 
by its greater incentives, its inspirations, 
its discoveries, its responsibilities, by all 
things which go to make up its sober opti- 
mism, to the preacher as much as to any- 
body. More to him than to anybody if he 
has the insight and courage of a noble 
faith. 

I have been speaking to you to-day 
about the atmosphere of Christianity in 
which you begin your work. I believe 
that it is charged with hope. I have given 



OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 223 

you my reasons for my faith. The gener- 
ation, as you are better able to feel it than 
any one else, is alive. You are not taking 
up the unfinished task of old men, written 
over with failure. You belong to a genera- 
tion which is taking the initiative, propos- 
ing to itself new methods and new ends. 
You have the rare advantage of watching a 
new truth as it begins to take shape in the 
thought of the church, no less a truth than 
that of the kingdom of God, a kingdom of 
righteous forces, as well as of righteous men 
and nations. And you have above all the 
readjusted thought of God set with new 
power to the needs of men ; the sovereignty 
of God, transformed and transfigured by his 
fatherhood ; the cross of Christ acknow- 
ledged as the supreme example of the sacri- 
ficial law of the universe; and the assurance 
of the divine order, the continuity of the 
divine working, made manifest by the re- 
cognized presence of the spirit of God as 
a universal presence. 

This is the present phase of the opti- 
mism of Christianity, some part of which 
we must feel to be the preacher's. I do 
not know that Christianity ever came to 



224 OPTIMISM OF CHRISTIANITY 

an age with a larger hope or a better faith. 
It may be many and many an age before 
He shall come to whom the kingdoms of 
the earth belong, and whose right it is to 
rule, but surely we may take up in con- 
fident faith and urge on its way the great 
prayer of the Puritan statesman and poet 
who caught the hope and expectation of 
modern Christianity, the Christianity not 
only of men, but of nations. 

" Come forth out of thy royal chamber, 
O Prince of all the kings of the earth; put 
on the visible robes of thy imperial ma- 
jesty; take up that unlimited sceptre which 
thine Almighty Father hath bequeathed to 
thee : for now the voice of thy bride calls 
thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed." 



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